Dr. Javaid Laghari, the new Chairman of the Higher Education Commission, said today that providing access to higher education for the 24.5 million youth who are not enrolled in universities will be the top priority for the HEC. Dr. Laghari made these comments about an hour ago during an interview on Breakfast at Dawn, hosted by Naveen Naqvi. According to Dr. Laghari, only 0.5 million youth currently have access to higher education, whereas the number of Pakistanis of university-going age is around 25 million. He felt hopeful that the democratic government will fund the development of new universities to help educate a large number of potential students.
Dr Javaid Laghari Appointed Chairman HEC
August 27, 2009
Dr Javaid R Laghari, former senator and president of Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST), Karachi, has been appointed as the chairman of the Higher Education Commission by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani yesterday, Dawn and The Nation report in their today’s editions.
Research Highlight: Wiring Urdu to the 21st century
August 20, 2009
The reign of the English language over modern technology and the Internet may soon be at an end. Increasingly, local language technologies are emerging to challenge the role of English as the language of the web. Representing Urdu and other Pakistani languages at the forefront of this battle is the Centre for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP). For Dr. Sarmad Hussain, founding director of CRULP, and his team, developing the capacity of local language processing is not merely an intellectual exercise in machine processing research but their contribution to the global struggle, which aims to provide every human access to information regardless of the language they speak. Like the translators of Al-Mamun, the eighth Abbasid caliph, who translated and protected many of the classics of Greek, Indian, Persian and Chinese scholarship from the ash-heap of history, the team at CRULP is working to bridge the disconnect that exists between the wealth of knowledge available on the Internet and the large non-English speaking segment of Pakistani society. While this team may not have royal patronage like the Abbasid translators, who were paid in gold equal to the weight of the books that they translated, the dissemination of knowledge and the legacy of scholarship team CRULP leaves behind will be invaluable. I recently visited the CRULP headquarters at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES), Lahore, where project manager Kiran Khurshid showed me around the CRULP lab and talked about the various projects currently in progress.
The overarching goal of CRULP is to develop local language processing technologies to provide people easy access to information regardless of the local language they speak. The traditional approaches to introducing technology into rural areas have involved providing schools and colleges with computers and expecting the locals to learn and adapt to modern technology. Dr. Hussein sees a fundamental flaw in this approach, in that they either fail to address or underestimate the two major barriers people face in using modern technology: illiteracy and language. With 45% of the population illiterate and most people unable to interact in English, it is impractical to expect them to use computers to access information through current technology. The team at CRULP aims to break the illiteracy barrier by developing Urdu Speech Recognition systems and Text to Speech systems to allow users to operate technology vocally. The language barriers are being tackled through the development of software in Urdu, examples of which include the SeaMonkey internet suite that provides users Urdu-based tools to make websites, surf the internet, email etc.
Students’ extracurricular activities on campuses are signs of thriving learning centers. There have been student unions in our colleges and universities since independence. These elected student bodies were first banned during Zia’s regime, restored for a short interval in 1988 when PPP came into power, and then banned again a year later. The debate on whether these bodies should be allowed on campuses has been revived by the current government.
Student political groups, which are, in reality, the student wings of regional or mainstream political parties, plead vigorously in favor of student unions and it has been a common observation that these groups flourish when student unions are in place. There are a lot of people in our institutions who advocate student unions on the basis of their existence and functioning in many developed countries. Student unions in developed countries are entirely and strictly indigenous student bodies having absolutely no relationship with any national or regional political pressure groups. With such a composition, these unions serve the students of the specific institutions in which they operate. They have no plans, intentions, or functions that relate to national or regional politics.
Happy 63rd Independence Day
August 14, 2009
Happy 63rd Independence Day to all our readers.
“Remember that your Government is like your garden. Your garden flourishes by the way you look after it and the efforts that you put towards its improvement. Similarly, your Government can only flourish by your patriotic, honest and constructive efforts to improve it.” — Founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, speaking at Islamia College, Peshawar, April 12, 1948.
Text of the complete speech, titled “Responsibilities of the Youth”, is available at HumSafar.info.
Adoption of New Education Policy Being Delayed?
August 10, 2009
Dawn News reported this week that the adoption of the new National Education Policy is being delayed by the government, for no clear reason. The work on this new policy started in 2005, and the first milestone was the white paper produced by the Ministry of Education in 2007. Based on this white paper, the policy document was finalized by 2009, but has not yet been adopted by the government. Read the rest of this entry »
Q&A with Pervez Hoodbhoy: Part 1 of 2
August 4, 2009
Editor’s Note: Pervez Hoodbhoy is head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University and a prominent social activist in Pakistan. We conducted this interview through email correspondence over a few weeks, to get his perspective on the state of higher education in Pakistan. This is the first in a two part series. The second part is shared here.
STEP: According to recent estimates, less than half of Pakistan’s population is literate, less than half have access to basic sanitation, and the economy is strangled by debt. In context of this, what is the social relevance and value of the modern university, with its emphasis on research and higher learning, in Pakistan today?
PH: Pakistan’s social indicators are indeed abysmal. But no country can wait for everything and everybody to get up to speed before making universities. Nor should it, because that would essentially mean waiting forever. But we should remember that there is a difference in the purposes that universities serve in countries like Pakistan, and in advanced countries like the US. The latter have knowledge-driven economies, and universities function as the engines of progress. They are the fountainheads of modern science, and of new technologies that have changed the world more in the past fifty years than the previous ten thousand years.
Read the rest of this entry »
At this year’s International Science Olympiads, Pakistan’s team racked up the awards with seven bronze medals and two honorable mentions. The teams, selected by the STEM Careers Programme (SCP), participated in the International Biology (IBO), Chemistry (IChO), Mathematics (IMO), and Physics (IPhO) Olympiads. Congratulations to the bronze medal winners: Mahym Mansoor and Tayyaba Maqbool Malik in Biology, Saman Zia and Nayha Enver in Chemistry, Waqar Ali Syed in Mathematics, and Zain Ul Abideen Ali Khas in Physics. It is note-worthy that four of the six winners were women — note-worthy because the pool from which the girls were selected was far smaller than the pool from which the boys were selected. In all, 56 countries participated in IBO, 64 countries participated in IChO, 104 countries in IMO, and 72 countries participated in IPhO.
Pakistani Rescue Robot Participates in Robocup
August 2, 2009
A Pakistani robot participated in RoboCup 2009 for the first time in the competition’s history. The robot, named Saviour, was developed by a team of students from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI). Saviour is a rescue robot designed to find survivors in a disaster situation.
