STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Pakistan telecommunication authority is asking all telecom providers to ban a list of words from text messages that it considers inappropriate. The deadline to institute this ban is Monday, November 21, 2011.

The list includes harmless words such as ‘Jesus Christ’ besides the words generally considered inappropriate by the society. Imagine if ‘Muhammad’ was to be included in the list of banned words by a western country?

Telecom providers are carriers of information or bits, similar to a postal carrier. When one sends a letter using a postal carrier such as Pakistan Post, one is free to choose any words to express. Pakistan Post does not place any restriction on the contents of the letter.

There are legitimate concerns of spam text messages and sending inappropriate text messages to children. However, the former problem can potentially be solved using a ‘Do not receive message from a number not in contact’ mechanism. The later problem can be addressed by limiting the use of text messages for under age children when purchasing the phone plan.

The most worrisome aspect of this ban a small number of people at PTA determine the list of inappropriate words and can arbitrary expand this list.

PTAs concerns about the use of inappropriate words are understandable. However, it is worth considering whether these concerns should be addressed via top down ban of words in SMS, or by educating and raising awareness among youth through educational campaigns in partnership with schools, colleges, and universities.

We invite our readers to discuss whether such a ban should be instituted by PTA.

A recent post on Slashdot reported a new set of regulations promulgated by Pakistan Telecommunication Authority on March 11, 2010, titled “Monitoring and Reconciliation of Telephony Traffic Regulations, 2010”. The post implied that through these regulations, Pakistan is banning the use of encryption. If true, this would effectively ban the use of popular software such as Skype and virtual private networks (VPNs) which use encryption. Encrypted VPNs form the backbone for conducting IT business operations securely.  ”I would be concerned as that means access to our private networks using VPN will be compromised,” said Babar Khan, who runs TechArete, a tech-company in Pakistan.

The regulation came into effect on July 10, 2010 and overrides an earlier regulation promulgated on November 13, 2008, titled “Monitoring and Reconciliation of International Traffic Regulations, 2008″. Our reading of the 2010 regulations indicate that they allow the Pakistani Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to monitor and block any traffic (encrypted or not), including voice and data, originating or terminating in Pakistan. Further, through these regulations, PTA is banning the use of encryption for signaling information. In case, the user of a telephony or data provider needs to encrypt its signaling information, it must obtain explicit permission from PTA. Below, we quote verbatim from page 549 of the Gazette of Pakistan, that describes this regulation:

“(6) The Licensee(s) and Access Provider shall ensure that signaling information is uncompressed, unencrypted, and not formatted in a manner which the installed monitoring system is unable to decipher using installed capabilities.

(7) In case it is not possible to monitor the signaling information of some traffic at the Probe and the Authority has agreed to let the traffic pass through, the required signaling information shall be extended from the Licensee(s) and Access Provider(s) network’s premises, at their own cost, including but not limited to the required format conversions, hauling of data to the Authority designated location, and installation of additional equipment to achieve information as specified in sub regulation (6) above.”

So what is signaling information? A signaling information identifies who is calling or exchanging data with whom. For example, if a user A of cell phone provider 1 calls user B of cell phone provider 2, a CDR (call data record) is created in the database records of both providers. Similar records can be created for data (IP) traffic. The promulgated regulation practically bans the use of encrypted virtual private networks (EVPNs) by IT businesses unless an explicit permission is maintained by PTA. In simple terms, any IT business in Pakistan which wants to use EVPNs must obtain an explicit permission from PTA. According to a PTA memo date July 21, 2011 posted on this blog, PTA is enforcing this regulation by sending warnings to ISPs. However, does PTA have the man power to vet the legality of every EVPN?

Are there any other software besides EVPNs that encrypt signaling information? The answer is clearly yes. Skype is an example of a popular software which encrypts its signaling information for establishing a voice or video call. If PTA’s regulation were to be strictly enforced, it will ban the use of Skype in Pakistan.

Besides restricting signaling information from being encrypted, the regulation forces the providers of voice and data traffic to procure, establish, deploy, and maintain equipment for a monitoring system at their own costs. Below is the excerpt from the regulation:

1. Capability to monitor, control, measure, and record traffic in real-time
2. Capability for complete signaling record, including but not limited for billing
3. Capability to accurately measure the quality of service
4. A complete list of Pakistani customers and their details
5. Complete details of capacity leased by the licensee(s) to their customers
6. No person, except the authority shall be allowed to monitor, reconcile or block any traffic directly or indirectly on their own network or that of the other network in the manner prescribed in these regulations, without prior written approval of the Authority.

We note that (1) and (2) are not necessarily specific to Pakistan. Many  countries have regulations in place which allow the competent authority to monitor the signaling record or intercept traffic. However, such snooping of traffic is usually accompanied by a court order. Therefore, the most worrisome part from the perspective of a Pakistani citizen is (6) which gives PTA the authority to monitor and block traffic. It is not clear whether PTA needs a court order to exercise this authority.

Has your online business being impacted by this law in any way? We invite you to post your experiences as comments.

Umar Saif is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and heads the Saif Center of Innovation (SCI, pronounced as ‘sky’), an incubator and training center for technology entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. Read the rest of this entry »

Babar Ahmad is the CEO of Mindstorm Studios, a gaming start up in Lahore, Pakistan. Babar is focused on creating world-class gaming titles on the PC and console platforms from within Pakistan. Babar also has a passion for teaching and lectures at the Engineering Department at LUMS. Prior to that, he was working as a wireless applications engineer at Silicon Laboratories. Babar holds a Masters in Wireless Communication and Management Sciences from Stanford University and a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Texas.

STEP: Tell us a little bit about Mindstorm Studios . How and when did it start, how big is the team, and what have you been doing (in addition to Cricket Revolution and all)?

Babar Ahmed: Mindstorm Studios was actually my brother’s brainchild. I was still in the US when he decided he wanted to make a cricket game. He was in Dubai back then; this is summer 2006. So he upped and came to Lahore, at about the same time that I decided to move to Pakistan. Neither of us had ever lived here before (been in UAE and USA all our lives); so it was an “interesting” experience to say the least. I’m referring to breaking red lights in reverse at midnight in my spanking new 2006 creaky Alto! Coming from a culture that tickets you on breaking a STOP sign, it was a change! I started teaching at LUMS shortly and helped my brother found Mindstorm.

We’ve been through a few phases over the past years and have dabbled in quite a few areas such as 3D short film animation, architectural visualization, creative advertisement, casual games, and 3D games. If you check out www.mindstormstudios.com you’ll see remnants of some of our portfolios up there. Currently, we’re focused on game development for the iOS platform (iPhone and iPad). We’ve launched about 5 titles on the platform so far, with another 4 coming out soon, and have over 3 million cumulative downloads of our games.

STEP: You went to graduate school at Stanford and then came to Pakistan to kick off your company. How was the experience of doing a start up without the necessary support structure that exists in the Silicon Valley? Is there a nascent start-up culture emerging in Pakistan?

BA: As counter-intuitive as it might sound, it’s a LOT easier to do a startup in Pakistan than it is in the Valley! Here’s the simple reason why: $10,000 might last a startup in Pakistan 6 months… you’d be lucky to make it past your first month in the US with that money! Sure, raising that $10k is hard, but its no walk in the park in the US either. Additionally, you can get a LOT of mileage from family/seed funding here unlike in the US, where you HAVE to go for  Angel or VC funding very early in the company’s life cycle because costs are so high. Rent here is cheap, people typically have strong family support systems and you can work out of people’s basements (we all have those here), there’s VERY little red-tape in starting a company here. Picture this: 3 people, 3 laptops, a basement, a wimax connection, some pizza and coffee, and there you go! You have the next internet startup in Lahore!

In the US, man, its competitive! First off, you have visa issues: if you’re not working somewhere you can’t stay in the country. Gotta resolve those first! Then there’s the obnoxious cost of doing anything! Then, you have to convince people to LEAVE their $100k per year jobs and go out on a limb with you. Good luck doing that with a $10k budget! Moreover, if the people you’re trying to convince are good enough (and they SHOULD be), then you’ll have another 10 people like yourself with similar offers! And once you’ve managed all that, you have to get your idea in front of a VC who has another 1000 ideas or more sitting on his table waiting for his attention!  And IFFFFFF all of that works out for you, you give up a big chunk of your stake in your company to make it happen.

See where I’m going with this? It’s the age of connectivity. The only thing stopping you from reaching a gazillion people is yourself. Doesn’t matter where you’re sitting. For example, we have 2.5 million downloads of our game Whacksy Taxi on the iPhone. How many of those people know that just a few guys created that game in 7 weeks out of a dusty room in Lahore? Of course, it also depends on the TYPE of startup you want to do, but I really feel there’s a LOT that can be done regardless of your physical location, and that makes Pakistan a very attractive environment for startups.

STEP: A game studio is different from the usual software development company. What unique opportunities and risks did you experience in establishing a game company in Pakistan?

BA: Doing a game startup was particularly hard for us;  not having any experience in the space didn’t help much either! The issue with game development is, exactly as you put it, its not traditional software development. Its walking the middle line between the left brain and the right brain. Finding the right people and making them mesh together to deliver on a creative vision is no easy task. We faced loads of issues, from audio production to art direction to motion capture and physics engines and everything in between! One of the key issues in Pakistan is finding people with the right exposure; notice I didn’t say skill set. You get some pretty mean coders and artists here; however making a video game is like making a movie, or a song. You have to make something that’s cool and appeals and to your target market’s entertainment requirements, and for that you need to be exposed to what that market likes and doesn’t like. Also, given the maturity of tools these days, you don’t need an army of developers to make the next hit game; in fact, I’ve seen several 2 man teams that have been very successful in the mobile games business.

Pakistan posed its unique challenges, the least of which was electricity! Personally, the way the game development industry has rapidly transformed over the past 3 years, I don’t believe that physical locality impacts your ability to deliver entertainment any more. That might be the case if you’re trying to make a $50M production that rivals Halo. But you’re not! You no longer have to make Steven Spielberg-type movie productions; you just have to make the next YouTube hit and you’re home free. And trust me, you DON’T need a degree if film making to do that!

I’m not trying to trivialize making a startup or a successful company/product. It really IS hard! I’m just saying in this age of connectivity and information, it’s a lot less harder than it used to be. There are fewer and fewer business and trade secrets, there’s an abundance of knowledge and information, and there are several vehicles readily available to get your message/product in front of millions.

STEP: Let’s talk about Cricket Revolution. There is a flurry of start-up activity around iPhone and Android games. Mindstorm, like you said, is active on that front as well. What made you switch gears and target the classic PC gaming market?

BA: Well, it was actually the other way round for us. We started off as a classic PC game developer back in 2006 when touch interfaces still belonged in movies like Minority Report. And then Steve Jobs changed the world; 5 years later here we are with a strong iOS focus making games for the iPhone and the iPad. We still had to see our initial development through though, and managed to get Cricket Revolution out the door in late 2009.

STEP: How long did it take to develop Cricket Revolution? What were some of the biggest challenges in developing and marketing?

BA: Three and a half years. In hindsight, we could have done it a lot sooner, probably in two, but that’s if we had known then what we know now. During the course of development we thought our biggest challenge was animation and real-time multiplayer gameplay. How were we going to get 500 cricket animations into the game? We had to learn about motion capture, figure out that it was too expensive for us to afford, and then just figure out a hack-way of doing it ourselves at a fraction of the cost. Solving real-time multiplayer issues was a challenge – how were we going to get players across the globe to time their shot within a few milliseconds when the latency between them was over half a second to begin with? Well, we never DID solve that problem! So we had lots of online connectivity issues and what not. Other development issues were creating a custom physics engine, a custom animation engine, designing the game to hit that “sweet spot” which is very elusive to find (WHY is it that you like some songs and don’t like others? What’s the magic entertainment recipe?). But all that aside, we managed to plough through development and get the game out the door, a very tough 3 and a half years later.

It was only after that, that we realized we still had our biggest problem still ahead of us… and that was marketing! Hey, I’m an engineer, and that’s all I’ve been taught since high school. The only thing I had sold so far was virtual crops in Farmville! So, how in God’s name, were we going to get our product to sell millions of copies across multiple international markets? Well, that’s where the publisher comes in; unfortunately, we chose the wrong publisher and got burned. Our game didn’t do that well, and a lot of the selling was left on our shoulders. Alhamdulillah, we managed to overcome that challenge with a few well-timed deals with Pepsi in Pakistan and Valve’s digital distribution via Steam, but it was a VERY nerve wrecking few months getting those deals in place. It taught us a very important business lesson, and that is you have to begin your marketing activities from day 0, BEFORE production even begins. That’s a little hard to do given we’re an engineering driven company, but that’s the only thing that can convert a cool product into a successful business. No business, no product.

STEP: Has the game been a local success? Have you been successful in dealing with piracy in Pakistan (and many other cricket-loving nations)?

BA: Yes and no. I’ve actually sat at shops in Hafeez Center (Lahore) and watched people come in and purchase a pirated copy of our game for peanuts! It’s a fools wish to try and combat piracy in a country like Pakistan. We have a hard time enforcing Supreme Court laws on security, let alone international copyright laws on video games! So instead of fighting piracy in Pakistan, I decided to embrace it and give the game out for free instead. To do so, we brought Pepsi into the deal, sold the rights of the game to them in Pakistan, and had them distribute the game for free throughout the territory. Everyone wins. In India, the market is a little more mature and large enough for non-pirated content to make a mark. We had some successful deals there too with multiple retailers and distributors picking up our game and selling it through several outlet stores all over India. That, in addition to digital distribution via Steam, has resulted in a fairly wide adoption for our game, as far as independently produced PC games go.

STEP: Congratulations to you for Cricket Power becoming the official ICC World Cup game? How was the competition? What set Cricket Revolution apart from the rest?

BA: Thank you! I can’t speak for the competition; there are a few pretty good cricket games out there from the likes of EA and Codemasters. We pitched our game to a publisher, who then pitched it to the ICC; one thing led to another, ICC really liked our game, the publisher believed in our development capability, and lo and behold Cricket Power happened. The key was that we offered a complete 3D game served entirely in the browser, which was something that no one else had done in the past at the quality mark that we had. So we really had a product that stood out from the rest with a fairly small digital footprint in terms of download size. That, plus the fact that the game was redesigned for the casual audience in a pick up and play style gave it the boost it needed for selection. We’re really happy that we made it that far; hadn’t planned for it! But, alhamdulillah, the product shone through and here we are!

STEP: What’s next for Cricket Revolution and your company?

BA: We’re working hard on our next titles. We’re targeting the iOS primarily for now, so stay tuned for some releases soon! As far as Mindstorm goes, I really would like to see a game development industry grow in Pakistan by taking the lead from companies like ourselves and others who have gone down this path. I mean, game development is HUGE! Like, bigger than Hollywood HUGE! It’s not THAT hard to do, given the multitude of resources and tools available on the web. Pakistan is a low cost development center, you have everything you need on your laptop, and a single hit can make you good money! I would really like to see Pakistan come up on the global map for game development. A lot of countries are doing so, some with amazing government support (I believe Malaysia offers free electricity, office space, and 50% salary subsidy to game developers!!!!). I think if we can spawn a few startups in this space due to our efforts, and publicity that we’ve achieved, I would believe Mindstorm has truly done its job.

STEP: You also teach at LUMS. Do you think the Computer Science programs in our universities are adequately preparing students for a career in game development? If not, what needs to change?

BA: No, I don’t think they are. In my opinion, there are three aspects to this: a) Technical, b) Career, and c) Creativity. From a technical perspective, we’re more or less ok. Yes, we could do with a few courses targeted specifically to the game development pipeline to demystify the process for young minds. However, programming is just a small part of creating a game. Game design, production methods, audio production, quality assurance, and psychology are all equally important, to name a few. So, you CAN throw in game development courses into a CS curriculum, but unless a curriculum targets these other aspects that are equally important to game development, you’ll just end up with good programmers, which is good, sure, but only part of the equation. The second issue is a career perspective. Our professors and educators need to understand that game development is one of the hottest career choices on the planet right now, and will continue to be for some time. We have some serious cultural issues associated with games where the older generation believes that games are a total waste of time and not important. While they have a particular perspective, the world truly has changed. The average age of a gamer is now 35!! Everyone’s playing games! And unless our educators (and our families) treat this profession as a viable career choice, game development as a career just won’t get the adoption it deserves.

Lastly, the BIGGEST issue is creativity. Most curricula are designed to follow patterns; courses where there is a right answer and a wrong answer. The entire grading system is predicated on this one fact, and it has to be. This forces the mind to think along a certain line, a certain path, and move away from experimentation for fear of failure. This is a deeper psychological issue that can’t really be fixed just in a few courses. But I ask you, would you have guessed that a video like “Charlie Bit My Finger” would have 294 MILLION views on YouTube? Or do you think a game like “iFart” would make $100,000 in 2 weeks and be the #1 app on the App Store? I’m not saying that things like these always work. What I AM saying is that game developers need to think out of the box to truly define what entertainment value is, and it could be anything that our imagination allows it to be. I just don’t think our curricula are designed to grow that thought process and could do with a dash of imagination and fearless creativity.

According to the news reports published in The News and Dawn, the Implementation Commission of the 18th Amendment has decided to devolve Higher Education Commission to the provinces. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, in an article titled “HEC Should Return to Pakistan”, Jehanzeb Ahmed, Head of the Electrical Engineering Department at Bahria University, made the case that technology, not science, is the pressing need of the country. Read the rest of this entry »

From natural calamities like the 2005 Earthquake and the 2010 Flood, to the burdens of daily living like load-shedding and water distribution, Pakistan’s problems span the socio-economic gamut. The challenges that need to be tackled are well-understood and have been the topic of countless discussions in drawing rooms across the country. In this discussion thread, we hope to identify specific problems that would benefit most from the innovations of the scientific and technical communities in Pakistan’s universities, government, and industry. Read the rest of this entry »

The First Annual Pakistan Blog Awards were awarded in Karachi on 28th May, 2010. STEP was honored to be  the recipient of the award in the Best Education Blog category. We are honored and delighted, mostly because we had some very worthy contenders in our category — we encourage our readers to visit and support their efforts in this domain too. Read the rest of this entry »

The next talk in the STEP Lecture Series will be given by Prof. Jeannette Wing, President’s Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, on Friday, April 23rd at 5:00pm PST. The title of the talk is Computational Thinking. The talk will be streamed live and a brief Q&A session will follow the talk. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.

Title: Computational Thinking

Where: Air University, FAST-NU Islamabad, IMS Peshawar, LUMS, and NUST SEECS.

When: April 23rd, 2010, 5-7pm Pakistan Standard Time (8-10am EDT).

Online video of the talk

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Abstract: My vision for the 21st Century: Computational thinking will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, let’s add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Bio: Dr. Jeannette M. Wing is the President’s Professor of Computer Science in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her S.B. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 and her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1983, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 2004-2007, she was Head of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. Currently on leave from CMU, she is the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation.

Professor Wing’s general research interests are in the areas of specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current focus is on the foundations of trustworthy computing.

Professor Wing was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals. She has been a member of many advisory boards, including: the Networking and Information Technology (NITRD) Technical Advisory Group to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Tecbnology (PCAST), the National Academies of Sciences’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, ACM Council, the DARPA Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Board, NSF’s CISE Advisory Committee, Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board, the Intel Research Pittsburgh’s Advisory Board, and the Sloan Research Fellowships Program Committee. She is a member of AAAS, ACM, IEEE, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu. Professor Wing is an AAAS Fellow, ACM Fellow, and IEEE Fellow.

Acknowledgments: Special thanks to Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) for facilitating the video broadcast of this talk.

The other day I read Dr. Usmani’s article “From Florida to Topi: A Returning Fulbright Scholar’s Search for an Academic Position” on STEP. I sincerely appreciate his return (to Pakistan), and his desire to serve. However, in discussing Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (SZABIST), Dr. Usmani has unintentionally — I am giving him the benefit of the doubt — offended me. Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to enforce quality, the HEC recently announced that they would not recognize PhD degrees awarded unless the recipient manages to score a 40 percentile on the GRE subject test at the time of admission to the graduate program, reported here. This is a revision of HEC’s earlier policy, announced four years back, that the GRE subject test must be cleared before submitting the thesis. The announcement has proven controversial among PhD instructors and their students. Read the rest of this entry »

Nature’s recent article on higher education in Pakistan has re-ignited the debate on higher education reform, evoking strong responses from both supporters and critics of the HEC. Recently, we interviewed the lead author Dr. Athar Osama, to learn more about his wider conclusions, and his response to some of the criticisms of the methodology used in the Nature article.

To seed this discussion, we present commentary from Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman. Dr. Hoodbhoy presents his opposing point of view, arguing that the measures presented in the article were inadequate, and further that the conclusions drawn from the metrics were flawed. Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman, founding (and former) chairman of the HEC, who led the higher education reform effort during his tenure, responds by pointing to data that, in his view, shows the depth and breadth of the reform’s success.

We invite our readers to contribute their thoughts on what metrics are appropriate for measuring the success of higher education within the context of Pakistan.

NOTE: Both commentators have significantly shaped the landscape of Pakistani education over the last few decades. We request our discussants to avoid personalizing the discussion and to maintain a civil and constructive tone.

Read the rest of this entry »