Umar Saif,

“The TR35 recognizes the world’s top 35 young innovators that are radically transforming technology as we know it. Their work – spanning medicine, computing, communications, energy, electronics and nanotechnology — is changing our world”, according to MIT Technology Review.

According to a LUMS press release today, this is the first time that a Pakistani has been selected in the TR35 list.

Dr. Umar Saif joins an elite group of researchers and entrepreneurs selected over the last decade. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer at Apple; David Karp, founder of Tumbler; Harvard Professor Alán Aspuru-Guzik for his work on Quantum computers; and MIT Neuroscientist Ed Boyden, one of the inventors of the emerging field of optogenetics, which makes it possible to control neurons with light.

Dr. Saif joined LUMS after completing a post doctorate at MIT where he was part of the group that developed technologies for project Oxygen. At LUMS, his research is focused on technology for developing regions. He has recently developed BitMate, a BitTorrent client for improving download speeds in regions with poor Internet connectivity. The client was been downloaded more than 30,000 times by people in 173 countries.

Dr. Saif is also a co-founder of several startups at his Saif Center for Innovation. The startups include SeenReport, BumpIn, and SMSall. Talking to STEP earlier, he offered his vision of Saif Center in a previous interview here. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Mark Weiser award, Microsoft Research award, and IDG CIO Technology pioneer award. He was also named as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010.

Congratulations Umar!

How to bring this number down and create a skilled workforce is no small challenge. And, the fact that higher education in high-value fields like engineering and medicine is fairly expensive makes the problem even harder. University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, one of the premier public-sector engineering schools in the country, spends roughly Rs. 200,000 per student per year (not including the cost of developing new infrastructure for future expansion). Add to that the cost of living that is usually borne by the student himself or herself, and the price tag of producing one engineer runs well over a million rupees. Multiply that with the need to produce tens of thousands of engineers and scientists to keep pace with developing countries like Turkey, Brazil, India and China, and it is easy to see how daunting the math simply is. To illustrate the point, Chinese universities graduate roughly 350,000 engineers each year. If we were to aim at producing 50,000 engineers at the cost of Rs. 0.25 million each (borne by the state), it would add up to Rs. 12.5 billion just to run the engineering programs nation-wide. The entire budget allocation for HEC for the fiscal year 2011-12 is Rs. 14 billion.

The important question, which to my view is not getting enough attention, then is this: How do we create a system where we are able to train tens of thousands of engineers every year without going deeper into debt? And, perhaps more importantly, how to do we create a system where the engineers our universities produce are job-ready? Because, after 16 years of education, if it takes an engineer another two years (or more) to add value to the society, it simply adds to the burden.

A one-of-a-kind experiential education program in the Iron Range region in northeastern Minnesota in the United States offers an worthy model. The Iron Range region is rich in multiple distinct bands of iron ore, and houses mining, paper, and energy industry. Faced with the challenge of finding engineers who are ready and willing to work in the local industry, a consortium of local businesses and universities have banded together to design a unique engineering programmed called Iron Range Engineering (IRE).

IRE is an upper division engineering program (3rd and 4th years).  Students graduate with a B.S. in Engineering, with an emphasis of their choice (e.g., Mechanical Engineering) from Minnesota State University. Students join the Iron Range Engineering program after spending two years taking foundational courses in maths, programming, and engineering sciences at area community colleges or other universities. Specifically, the program requires that incoming students complete 51 credits, including the following courses:

General Physics (calculus-based), 10 credits
Calculus and Differential Equations, 16 credits
Introduction to Engineering, 2 credits
Engineering Mechanics (Statics & Dynamics), 6 credits
Electrical Engineering (Circuits, including lab), 4 credits
Chemistry, 5 credits
English Composition, 4 credits
Computer Graphics Communication, 1 credit
Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing, 1 credit
Introduction to Problem Solving and Engineering Design, 2 credits

The distinguishing feature of that program is that at IRE, students do not take any classes. They spend 20 hours per week working on projects at local manufacturing plants under the direction of practicing engineers. The remaining 20 hours per week are devoted to learning engineering theory and discussing its application with the faculty. As  a result, students and faculty spend a tremendous amount of time interacting on the learning of the technical knowledge, the professional skills, and design processes. This unique method of instruction completes them as engineers, while keeping them firmly grounded in the context of the local manufacturing industry.

Students in the program blog about their experience on irengineering.blogspot.com. Their posts provides a window into the program and what kind of projects the students are engaged in. For example, on April 7, a student blogged:

After multiple meetings with the engineers and mechanics, we have narrowed our design down to hydraulics. The team has been working to complete two different mounting designs for the hydraulic system for installation. When the designs are finished and our price estimates are complete, we will then present our final work to Hibbing Taconite. We are nearing completion, even though we planned on having our final deliverable done by Friday, April 15th. We set our finish date early so that if we ran into issues or had delays, we could still finish before the end of the semester. Also, we set our end date sooner so that Hibbing Taconite could install the lift system as soon as possible because they are ready to get it installed

Iron Range Engineering is a program in its infancy. Started in 2009, there are currently only 25 students in the program with the first graduates expected in December, 2011. So, it may be a while before we can judge the success of the program. But, that does not mean we cannot learn from it and build from its example.

A program like IRE offers several unique benefits in the context of our own education system:

• First, by allowing students to take foundational courses at local colleges, instead of national universities which are concentrated in major metropolitan cities, the cost of both tuition and lodging can be reduced significantly for students in rural areas or residing outside major metropolitan cities like Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Karachi. In addition to lowering the financial cost for families outside major cities, this option can be especially attractive for girls whose parents might be reluctant to send them to major cities at a young age.
• Second, by teaming up students with professionals in the industry, the time spent in the engineering program contributes directly to job-readiness of the students. Since students have access to the faculty at the university during this time, they are not reliant entirely on their industry mentors for help and guidance in technical matters. In other words, it allows industry to off-load part of employee training to the university.
• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a program like the IRE creates a true symbiotic relationship between the local industry and the academia. The industry benefits mainly by having a ready supply of qualified engineers who can not only meet the technical needs, but are also familiar with the work environment. And, the academia benefits by offering the faculty an organic collaborative relationship with the industry — a true win-win for both sides, and especially for the students.

It may be that IRE model is an idea far too radical, and far too demanding to work in Pakistan. Many times, when it comes to education policy, what appears like a sound idea on paper does not translate well in the real world. So may be the case with IRE. My point, however is that the cost of traditional higher education is simply far too great on the individual and the societal level to work for a populous and debt-ridden country like Pakistan. We have no choice but to think of creative ways to leverage precious resources to benefit the greatest number of students. The traditional four-year programs offered at our top engineering universities like the UET Lahore, NUST SEECS, and LUMS SSE simply cannot be scaled to large enough a number. We have to come to terms with this basic reality, and chart a different course rather than try to replicate the same model of education but with inferior resources.

STEP: What is the Saif Center of Innovation and what was your rationale behind establishing it?

Umar Saif: It is common in universities like MIT for professors to be involved in startups. Indeed, companies like Akamai, RSA, and 3Com were all started by MIT professors and have gone on to generate billions of dollars in annual revenues.

When I moved to Pakistan around five years ago, I found that, with some effort, I could carry on doing good research, but starting a high-tech venture seemed quite out of reach. Basically, there was no eco-system for a true startup: a small company focused on an innovative product or business model that makes many multiples of the initial investment. There was no VC money available, no clear exit route (acquisition or IPO), very weak corporate law with little provision for things like co-founder options or vesting schedule. Above all, even the best students from a university like LUMS were running after jobs from outsourcing joints, with no real potential for growth beyond a certain glass ceiling (the largest IT company in Pakistan is less than 300 people).

All of this became painfully clear to me when I started BumpIn.com in a small guest room in my house. It wasn’t exactly in the garage, but it was close enough (the guest room was directly above the garage!). We toiled, dreamed, and persevered for more than 2 years to be reminded over and over again how difficult it is to do a Silicon-valley style startup in Pakistan.

This eventually led to me to setup SCI. SCI is facility for startup incubation. It is big and well-provisioned (4 floors, 18,000 square feet of covered space, dedicated fiber-optic connection), but the biggest strength of SCI is its inhabitants. Everyone at SCI works for a single purpose: to create innovative products that can result in a $100 million company. My highest point of the day in SCI is when I see two entrepreneurs from different companies share their vision, technology insights, and dreams.

In a sense, SCI is not very different from incubator models like the Y-combinator or tech-stars, albeit we do not have the same level of funding, visibility, or access to lots of successful entrepreneurs as mentors.

STEP: SCI is an incubation center but also a “training center for technology entrepreneurs and enthusiasts” (statement from the SCI page). What kind of training does a technology entrepreneur in Pakistan need?

US: The training is mostly informal. What we share with each other on a BBQ on our rooftop is at times much more valuable than what 4 years at MIT taught me. I learn everyday from our budding stars. We hope to formalize more training programs going forward, e.g., business plan competitions, workshops on technologies, pitching.

For the activities, a startup is mostly an art, not as much as science. Our activities involve everything from discussing and refining business strategy, developing business plans, preparing sales pitches, raising funding, finalizing contracts, developing new tools, organizing PR campaigns etc.

STEP: Do you think that incubation centers can work in Pakistan in the long term?

US: Of course. They have worked in many countries. I was in Seoul a few years ago and was told that there are close to 300 incubators in Seoul alone. An incubator lowers the barrier for brilliant entrepreneurs to start a company. An incubator shares the risk, shares the highs and lows and mostly takes care of the mundane aspects of running an exciting tech venture. I hope more incubators will take root in Pakistan.

STEP: Have any startups ‘graduated’ from the center?

US: There are many levels of graduation. The first 3 startups — BumpIn.com, SMSall.pk and Seenreport.com — have all become profitable ventures and moved into bigger spaces with access to more resources and more room for expansion. We are looking forward to the time they outgrow the facilities at SCI and move into their own space.

I firmly believe that if we can churn out one success out of SCI, we will create a wave of brilliant students all wanting to do a startup. All we need is one success story – but its many times more difficult to come by in a country that no investor on Sand Hill Road is willing to touch with a 10 foot pole, and where electricity is available for only about half of a working day.

Created in the Fall 2000 as a group of just a few to help the needy students of Topi, Project Topi now comprises of more than fifty volunteer members. In the past ten years, Project Topi has expanded itself from a helper of the people of Topi to one of the larger student-run welfare societies in Pakistani universities. We have worked on several projects at the provincial and national level, thus extending our horizons beyond Topi.

Project Topi organizes several events throughout the academic year. Despite other activities of the organization, our main focus remains on helping the students of Topi village. We host a call for volunteers every year, and those who volunteer give an hour of  free tutoring to the students in Topi schools, including the Topi High School, Hamlet High School and GIKI School. Several deserving students are also given financial aids and scholarships each year to help them complete their education.

As is the case with the most of the underdeveloped villages in Pakistan, Topi also has inadequate health care facilities. A majority of the villagers are financially weak and cannot afford even basic life saving drugs and treatments.  Project Topi has been actively participating in providing health care to the people in the region by organizing Blood Donation Camps and Free Medical Camps in collaboration with reputed NGOs, such as Jamila Sultana Foundation, Pakistan Red Crescent Society, Fatimid Foundation, and Al-Khidmat Foundation. On several occasions, Project Topic has also raised funds to help pay medical bills for workers and staff members of the Institute and their families.

Project Topi has worked tirelessly during nationwide disasters, such as the Earth Quake of October 2005, the thought of which still makes us shiver, and the massive outflow of Internally Displaced People of Swat. Last year when the unfortunate floods swept through the country causing catastrophic loss of property and life, Project Topi stood up to the challenge despite meager resources at its disposal. With the help of Drs. Tariq Saeed and Siraj ul Haq, faculty members at the GIK Institute, several relief camps were organized in the affected areas. To raise funds for these camps, members of Project Topi team went door to door to students, faculty members, and alumni of GIKI, and their own families and friends. Within a few weeks, we raised around 1 million Rupees. With these funds, and other donations received by Project Topi in the form of clothes, cash, medicine, food and stationary items, the organization started relief work in Charsadda district of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa. Food items such as flour, oil, sugar, tea, and clean drinking water were provided to over two hundred families living in the relief camps around Charsadda.  In addition, around one thousand school bags with stationary items and books were distributed among the children of the area so they could resume their academic activities. A medical camp was also organized with the help of GIKI’s medical team at a village near Charsadda. Sewn clothes, small gifts and little cash envelopes were also distributed among several families as eidi on the occasion of Eid.

Believing in the principle of teaching people how to catch fish rather than just providing it, following the devastating floods, Project Topi helped several small businessmen, shopkeepers and other daily-wagers to resume their business activities and start supporting their families again. A group comprising of electricians, a taxi driver, a milkman, a crockery store owner, and a fruit-seller was among the many helped through a micro-finance scheme. This was a joint effort of Project Topi and software consultancy firm Enablistic.

Project Topi will continue to work to provide development assistance, health care and education to the people in and around GIK Institute. It is true that one should not flaunt and brag about helping the needy. But, it is also important to let people inside and outside of GIKI know about the efforts that members of Project Topi are making in order to revive the sense of helping others. Our hope is that our efforts to provide opportunities to the people of the under-developed area around our Institute will inspire others to do the same in their communities.

To learn more and stay updated on the activities of Project Topi, email us at projecttopi@giki.edu.pk or follow us on Facebook.

Kaleem Ahmed is a undergraduate Senior at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, majoring in Computer Science (Software Engineering). He is also the outgoing General Secretary of Project Topi. If you would like to spread the word about your student organization involved in philanthropic work in Pakistan, please email us at editors@nextstepforward.net.

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.

Throughout my life I have hated mathematics with a passion. I hated its rules and notations. I hated the fact that I had absolutely no say in whatever was going on in the class. I just had to sit there and listen to my math teacher go on and on about formulas, notations needed to write these formulas, practice questions which would help us memorize these formulas and eventually “practical problems” which were supposed to exhibit the relevance of these formulas in everyday life although even the eight year-old me could tell that these were merely the same practice questions loosely disguised in the most unlikely of social situations known to man. And frankly, I didn’t care. I didn’t care where x was, or how much older Mary was than her brother Mark or when train A would reach London. As far as I was concerned math was an obsolete science to which I didn’t want to contribute to and which, for the most part, didn’t really want me to contribute to it anyway.

Therefore it comes as a surprise to many people that I am currently a Computer Science major focusing on theoretical computer science, which is basically a branch of mathematics. I, who had once famously given a speech to my seventh-grade math class about the pointlessness of mathematics, am now the one trying to explain to other people the beauty of Erdos’ brilliant proofs. And it all started with the following beautiful proof of the infinity of prime numbers:

For any finite set  {p_1,p₂…p_r} of primes consider the number n= p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r +1. This n has a prime divisor p but this is not one of the {p_1,p₂…p_r}, otherwise p would be a divisor of n and the product  p_1..p_2..p₃…p_{r ,} and thus also of the difference n-( p_1..p_2..p₃…p_r) =1, which is impossible.  So a finite set {p_1,p₂…p_r} cannot be the collection of all prime numbers.

I first heard of this proof in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics course I took during my sophomore year at university. The instructor didn’t even write the proof down, with all its messy set notation. He just told us about the idea of putting the prime numbers together in a group and showed us what goes wrong if we assume the group to be finite. At first I thought this was one of those introductory shenanigans professors deploy in the first class to get students interested. How could something so simple be counted as math? Where were the fancy symbols and the list of variables with their definitions? Where was the list of steps used to reach the conclusion? Where were the ten similar questions I needed to solve at home for practice? This was simply a clever idea used to solve a problem. Surely, this couldn’t be math! But, as I have learnt in the past year, this is basically what math is: a set of simple ideas used to solve problems. Sometimes the problems can be simplified to older problems for which people have already come up with solutions. Sometimes ideas which have been used to solve a certain problem can be used to solve an unrelated problem. But the simplicity of the process remains intact. It is the ‘idea’ which is at the heart of all mathematics, and to come up with ideas you just need creativity (and maybe a pencil and a notebook).

If a course can change the path of a person’s life, then this discrete math course changed mine. In the course of nine weeks, I was introduced to the kind of math I hadn’t even known existed. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like a robot while doing math. I actually had to think about the problems and figure out strategies for solving them. While I was introduced to techniques like induction and graph theory, for the most part my assignments and exams required me to come up with my own strategies based on these techniques and my own logical arguments and common sense. Math was like an elaborate game and finally I felt like it actually wanted me to take part.

So, this brings us to the central question: why did I, and countless other students, hate elementary and high school math? What needs to be done to make mathematics more interesting to students? Although I do not have any experience teaching mathematics, I do remember the reasons why I hated it so much and know exactly what eventually made me realize that I wanted to study a branch of mathematics as my major. For the sake of this article, I am going to ignore factors which affect all subjects alike and focus on why math has become such a hated subject.

Looking back at my years of struggling with high school math the first word that comes to mind is boredom. And this was not caused by a lack of interest in school because I was generally a very enthusiastic kid. I loved studying languages, history, and science. It was just math that I dreaded. And looking back at the way math is taught it comes as no surprise. While all other subjects are taught as an amalgamation of the history, foundations, rules and applications of the subject, math is mainly limited to the rules of the subject. Take a typical sixth grade science class. I remember learning about the effect of different factors on the rate of evaporation by placing different shaped beakers filled with water all over the school campus. What followed was a memorable class in which we all had mock “evaporation races” as we timed the beakers to see which one would lose its water first.It was only once we had made our own conclusions about which factors affected evaporation, that our teacher explained Brownian motion to us. She also mentioned factors such as surface area and wind-speed, which most of us had been able  to conclude for ourselves based on the observations we had made.

Now compare this to a typical sixth grade math class. Looking back, sixth grade was when some of the most wonderful mathematical concepts were introduced to us. It was in the sixth grade that we first encountered the idea of a variable and started to really analyze shapes. Statistics was introduced, and we started manipulating probabilities to get results which even now give me the feeling of being able to predict the future. But in the midst of all these amazing ideas, this is how a typical math class would go:

Teacher: An isosceles triangle is a triangle which has two sides of equal length. Okay?

Students: YES!

Teacher: So what is an isosceles triangle?

Students: A TRIANGLE WHICH HAS TWO SIDES OF EQUAL LENGTH !

And you can bet one of the questions on the progress test would be: “What is an isosceles triangle?”. In such a situation who would be interested in math? And these are not just two extreme examples I have mentioned to prove my point. Science that year continued to keep us hooked: we grew plants in inky water, caught insects in jars, experimented with mirrors and discovered the material we were supposed to learn, while in math we moved on to triangles which had no sides of equal length (I honestly don’t remember what they were called, though I think it begins with an s) and other lexical atrocities.

You may argue that science is an extreme example and that math just doesn’t have the exciting material needed to keep students hooked. While science teachers can use models, take their students outside or perform simple experiments to demonstrate their material, math teachers have nothing to interest a group of thirty kids. Not only do I disagree with this, I actually claim that it is the other way round and that it is the math teachers that have it good. While science teachers need extensive (and often non-available) funding to buy lab equipment and take their students out on field trips, all a math teacher needs are thirty pencils and notebooks. And how does he keep them interested? Well, he actually asks them to do some math. Do you remember the puzzle we probably all tried as kids in which we had to draw a house without lifting our pencils. That is just a simple example of a Eulerian path. And those complicated strategies for winning card games that our older siblings tried to explain to us were mostly simple applications of probability. The tower of rings of increasingly small diameters which we had to shift to another peg is the most common example given for recursive algorithms. The list of interesting mathematical problems which we solved willingly as kids is endless. Nim, Hex, magic tricks, and riddles in which we had to find loopholes in logical arguments are all example of the math we enjoyed as children and it is these problems which should be bought to the classroom to make math classes more interesting.

Another issue which I find with the way mathematics is taught, which is closely related to the first, is the extreme and almost exclusive emphasis on the utterly mundane aspects of mathematics. Take the isosceles triangle example above. Would it really have mattered if we had called the triangles, “triangles with two equal sides”? Maybe shortened to TWTES (pronounced tevtes). What’s important are the properties of these triangles. Instead of asking a child to spend time trying to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of this weird word, she should be asked to think about how they are made, and how the angles inside this triangle are related to each other. I am pretty sure if a child made a dozen different TWTES’ she would figure out most of their  properties for herself and she would actually enjoy the mental excursion of discovering these properties instead of hastily be given a list of them in the last fifteen minutes of class.

Admittedly, there are some terms and jargon that a student of mathematics must learn in order for the classes to be held smoothly and for the students to eventually take part in the wider mathematical discourse. But no other subject puts even half of the emphasis that math places on its lexicon. Take the example of chemistry. If a subject has the right to focus on terminology it is chemistry, with it’s multitude of  symbols, chemical formulas and specific reactions. But not once do I remember a chemistry teacher reciting the names of the elements along with their atomic symbols. Instead, we focused on the elements and their reactions and any time we needed help deciphering a symbol we could simply look it up on the huge periodic table taped to the classroom wall. Maybe that is what mathematics needs: a periodic table of shapes and functions which would be taped to the wall of every classroom. Then, children all over the world could forget about mathematical terminology and actually do some math.

And by ‘doing math’ I don’t mean the mindless repetition, or solving exercise problems at the end of every chapter. As a result of school mathematics, most people end up believing math is the application of known rules to problems that we know the rules can solve. That is the job of an accountant or a cashier or an insurance planner. A mathematicians  job is much simpler. He must come up with the rules that other people are to use. When faced with a problem, he is not told that it can be solved using the second trigonometric identity; that is what he must figure out. And while this is harder than simply applying a set of rules, the result of coming up with a solution is infinitely more rewarding. You can compare the two as the difference between the joy a child feels in having an adult place him on a bike and push him along, and the joy he feels when he races through the park himself. It is hard to teach him how to ride and it might take him ages to learn but all parents understand that the end result is worth it. Math teachers should definitely do the same with their students.

And if difficulty was such a major barrier, why doesn’t it stop teachers of other subjects from trying to get their students to appreciate the beauty of their fields? By the end of high school most of us have faced the toughest aspects of most of the other subjects. We have read Iqbal’s poetry and critiqued it with our peers. We have a deep understanding of how the major systems of the body work. We have built electrical devices and have made original pieces of art in a range of different mediums. Then, why is it that most of us only experience the joy of coming up with a true mathematical proof well into our undergraduate programs? Surely there is something wrong going on here.

Perhaps equally impressive was the faculty that LUMS was able to assemble for this nascent school. It was a small — perhaps too small — group of promising young researchers, brought together by the project team to set the standard for LUMS SSE. Leading this group at the time was Dr. Asad Abidi, a professor at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Professor Abidi was born and raised in Pakistan and moved to England at age 16. After earning his B.S. from Imperial College London, he went on to complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Following a brief stint at the Bell Research Labs in New Jersey, in 1985 Professor Abidi joined the faculty at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.  An accomplished researchers and a pioneer in the field of RF CMOS design (the stuff that’s at the heart of our cell phones), Professor Abidi has won numerous honors, culminating with his election to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional honor accorded to American engineers for their life-time achievements.

In the summer of 2007, Professor Abidi went on leave from UCLA and joined LUMS as the first dean of SSE. There he played a pivotal role in setting the direction of the school. But, less than two years later, Professor Abidi was back at UCLA and at his home in the beautiful Pacific Palisades, California. That is where STEP Editor Bilal Zafar sat down with Professor Abidi to talk about LUMS SSE (Part 1), and much more (Part 2).

STEP: You were leading LUMS SSE when the first batch of students was admitted. In so far as the science and engineering universities are concerned, SSE’s process of student-induction was unique in Pakistan. What sort of students was LUMS SSE looking for in that first batch?

Asad Abidi (AA): We wanted to bring in students who could be groomed to be future leaders in science and technology, and who could influence hundreds of others. So, we handpicked the few who had a combination of things; academic excellence was not the only thing. Do they, for example, have passion? It’s too early to have passion for science – although some of them already demonstrated that – but do they have passion at all? Do they have leadership skills? Do they have a personality that could influence others? Do they have breadth in their intellect? So, we were looking for a personality and a total character that suggested entrepreneurship, leadership, and so on.

LUMS SSE is an intellectually elite institution and that was the basis for our selection criteria. Our aim was to focus this kind of very intellectually elite education on people who will have a 10x impact when they come out.

STEP: One popular criticism of LUMS SSE is that it might turn out to be a great institution, but it will be an institution for a few hundred people in a nation with 25 million people of university-going age. Can an institution like this really have an impact?

AA: It is too early to say, but it has a very clear precedent and model. And the model is institutions in the US like MIT or Caltech.

The idea was that each one of the students would be educated broadly and deeply in math and science or engineering, hopefully go on to do PhDs, then return to Pakistan or engage with it somehow to influence hundreds of others. That’s why we handpicked the few who had a combination of qualities.

At the first orientation, we told all the students, and their parents were sitting with them, that every one of you is going to make a significant change to Pakistan in the end.  You don’t know how yet. You may turn out to be a technical entrepreneur, start a high-tech company, you may turn out to be a world-renowned professor … we don’t know. But every one of you is going to have an impact, because that is our mission — to produce an entire generation of scientific and engineering leaders.

I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with focusing this kind of elite education on a small group of students. We cannot have every institution that is egalitarian; it’s just not possible.  There are many other universities in Pakistan that are egalitarian, and they do a fine job. Our argument is that there is room for one elite institution; a place at which people look and say, what are they up to? How do they teach the such-and-such subject? So, in terms of curricular innovation, bringing in research, and even administrative things like selection of undergraduates, LUMS SSE can be a trendsetter in Pakistan. So, I think there is room for one such institution.

STEP: Just one such institution?

AA: Yes, you can’t have two simply because there’s not enough faculty.  To have two world class institutions, you need two world class faculties. You can’t even get one together.

STEP: Harold Shapiro, former President of Princeton University, argues in his book “A Larger Sense of Purpose” that, in order to have a sound higher education system, you need strong interaction between world-class research universities in the country and other, less prestigious teaching institutions. To me, as an outsider, LUMS SSE comes across as if it exists in bubble inside Pakistan. For example, there are very few joint appointments between professors at, say, Quaid-e-Azam University or UET Lahore or NU-FAST or NUST and LUMS. Why is that?

AA: I completely agree that there has to be open communication with the whole community because, all the institutions that define the (higher education) eco-system play complimentary roles.

To your point about SSE “existing in a bubble”, I think it’s a little more complex than that. First of all, there is a lot of fear in Pakistan that, unless you are on guard, you’ll become mediocre. There is a history of erosion of institutions such as GIKI that had started with a bang. But, that does not mean that you put things in a bubble.  What it means is that, first, you build a critical mass that defines excellence and exemplifies it. Once you have the critical mass of faculty, then you can start engaging people from other institutions who come in and actually feel uplifted by their experience and their interaction. So, while SSE was going through this period of defining its culture as an institution, perhaps it came across as existing in a bubble.

Then, there are a lot of other factors which I’m not sure I want to go into too much. I’ll only say this much: there was a sense of elitism amongst the people involved in developing SSE, and I suppose you could argue that as long as it is intellectual elitism, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. But taken to extremes in the Pakistani milieu, elitism and over-zealousness can do damage. With the growth of the institution, I feel there is more maturity and less fear, less insecurity.

The fact of the matter is that the present faculty is so small that it is already stretched to the limit.  Next year, SSE would have three classes (freshman, sophomore and junior year) and at that point the faculty would have to bring in other people just to teach. So, I think that circumstances will force SSE to open up.  I was promoting some of this (while I was there), but at that early stage there was some opposition to this. My view was that you have to guard these fledgling institutions until this sense of excellence takes root, and once the institution knows where it’s going it should take others along with it.

STEP: Let’s get to the issue of sustainability. Can an institution like SSE sustain itself – financially as well as administratively — or will it be just a flash in the pan like many others?

AA: As of right now, it’s very hard to say. On the one hand, you can look at LUMS as an institution and say that it has been very resilient. Over the past 22 years it has only improved and, today, it enjoys a preeminent position in Pakistan. But that’s the business school, and more recently, social sciences and humanities; the Science and Engineering School is the newest addition. However, given the entirely different cultures, past success is no reliable predictor of the future.

The fragility at SSE, first of all, comes from its finances. Science instruction is an expensive enterprise. For science instruction you have to have building infrastructure, lab equipment, consumables and safety, etc., whereas in business instruction you need desks and computers. Also, SSE set a precedent by recruiting faculty with the promise that it could do publishable research, and that meant a lot of investment early on. This puts a large burden on the trustees to either give money themselves, or to raise large sums for SSE. They all come from the business background; they were involved with the business school, so perhaps one could argue that the trustees are still debating amongst themselves whether SSE is a good idea or not.  Or, at least a group among them feels that science can be real money drain with no short-term payoff, and I am sure this remains a subject of hot debate.

Administratively, the main issue is that of leadership. To run SSE, you need excellent leaders with great breadth of knowledge and experience in science research and teaching. The leaders must gain the trust and the respect of faculty, parents, students, and even government officials, because they have to interface with the government to get accreditation, funding, etc. They must also have the respect and credibility in the Pakistani academic community so that they can talk to their counterparts in other universities to show that SSE respects other institutions and wishes to bring everyone together as a community for mutual uplift. You need people at the top who do that job of being ambassadors and who really believe in it. But finding such leaders in Pakistan is very hard.

STEP: Just hard or impossible, at this point?

AA: It may be impossible.

STEP: Can’t you develop processes so that personalities become less relevant?

AA: I think it’s really hard to have well-impacted processes defined in fledgling institutions. There is just a lot of ad hoc stuff that you must do, and there is no precedence for what you may be trying to do. You can’t expect someone to come in and put in every conceivable process; it doesn’t work that way.  In new institutions, in my experience, you have to ‘wing it’, you have to improvise and much more importantly, you have to run it on enthusiasm more than on processes.  If the enthusiasm isn’t there at the beginning, people will just feel so fearful of their small numbers and the huge task ahead that they will slowly withdraw. So, you have to pump up a lot of enthusiasm in people; processes emerge in due course. This is why good leadership with relevant experience is important.

STEP: So, then, how can SSE make sure that it remains a strong institution without the kind of leadership you described?

AA: I think they have to become largely leader-independent. The faculty at LUMS is, on the whole, very sensible and mature. Their collective wisdom has to drive the institution, pretty much independent of who is at the top.  For example, if anyone sees a little conflagration coming up, it should be everybody’s business at LUMS to diffuse it.  That’s the only way to survive and I think there is some of that sense of ownership now developing. I think SSE’s Computer Science group, being large and having survived some adversities in the past, can point the way and say to the newly formed groups, ‘look, these little disputes or fears’ — and, by the way, all fighting within universities is over the most trivial of things  –  ‘have no basis and let’s remain focused on our bigger agenda’.

It takes a certain maturity and I worked pretty hard with the faculty to try to make them feel that as a group, as a collective decision-making body, they are very strong and that they can draw upon the traditions of LUMS — of resilience, improvement and excellence – and march on. I said to the faculty: name me the last three presidents of, say, Harvard University or some other famous university?  You won’t know them because they are in the background; what’s in the forefront is the faculty. I think they understand pretty well the need for this communal sense and shared responsibility. 

You see, Pakistani institutions are very fragile. Whether it’s a hospital or a charitable organization, they can fall apart when the right person walks away or dies or whatever.  Everything just hangs on a thread. We have to get beyond this; I mean, will the Edhi trust survive Edhi?

It shouldn’t be like that. Pakistan should take pride in its good institutions. People should say: here is an institution worth saving and we want it to get better next year, not worse. Those inside the institution should commit themselves; those outside it, the same. Parents should say, we want LUMS to get better regardless of who is it at the top, or whether its funds run out, because SSE is giving our children an opportunity we didn’t imagine was possible in Pakistan. People should say, look, of all the places in Pakistan doing science and engineering teaching and research, you guys are doing an excellent job, you must continue to do that; we are counting on it! That’s the kind of sentiment it takes to sustain an institution like the SSE.  But we have to be a little more mature as a society and understand that that’s how countries preserve their institutions. It takes a lot to keep these valuable things going.

STEP: But, a few years ago, a number of faculty members (around five) left LUMS. Do you feel that it has happened for the last time?

AA: I do not know all details, but I do have some idea of the problems that caused the departure. Basically, it was problems festering that were not tended to in time. When problems fester, they just get messier and messier. That is when leaders should step in and defuse the crises. But, I think these are inevitable growing pains in a Pakistani institution.

The important thing is that it should never happen again … because once is enough. This is why when I was at LUMS I told everybody to look at the mistakes of the past and pledge not to let them happen again… for the sake of the institution.  I very much hope that it was the last mass departure, because if the institution starts to hemorrhage its faculty, even if it loses just one or two people, things can unravel very quickly. And, that’s what I think everyone has to be on-guard for.

STEP: Final question on this topic of SSE: what is your advice to the people at LUMS?

AA: My message to the faculty at SSE is: you are the force, you are the institution. You are experienced, you are teaching at a world class university, you are doing great research in Pakistan, you just need to pull together and say, this is our institution, this is what we are fighting for and this is what we are building it for. You are the one who define this institution, and you will continue to bring fame to it. You are at the front-line, delivering a powerful tool (or, should I say, weapon) to the best of Pakistani youth to build a better future: a high quality, liberalizing, deep, higher education.

In part two of our conversation with Dr. Abidi, we talk about funding for higher education — can the current levels be sustained and why the industry is not investing more — and what Pakistanis abroad can do to help. So, stay tuned!

We posed these and some other questions to Sara Chak, a Developmental Therapist working in the Developmental Pediatrics Department at the Children’s Hospital, Lahore. Sara has a Masters in Special Education from Punjab University and has been working with special children for the last six years. Currently, she works with the parents or guardians of children with special needs.

STEP:The Special Education system relies on the detection of disabilities in infants and young children. In Pakistan, how advanced is the system of detection of disabilities which would lead a child to be described as having special needs?

Sara Chak: Most disabilities such as Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, bone defects, and epilepsy are identified at birth and most hospitals in Pakistan currently have an advanced system of assessing newborns for these conditions. Some disabilities, such as visual and hearing impairments, are diagnosed later on in the child’s life, but again the pediatric departments of most hospitals have the resources to perform tests to diagnose these disabilities. The problem, of course, lies in the fact that most children in Pakistan, are not born in hospitals. Traditional midwives are unable to assess newborns for theses disabilities and thus their detection is delayed, sometimes indefinitely.
One area of assessment where Pakistan lags behind is the psychological testing of those with visual or hearing impairments. Currently no institution in Pakistan currently provides tests for the intellectual assessment of these students, which hinders the academic progress of these children.

STEP: What is the next step taken once a child with special needs has been identified?

SC: This depends on the institution the child is taken to by his or her guardians and the recommendations of those they consult, usually the doctor who diagnosed the disability. Here at the Children’s hospital we have two learning centers: the two-hour learning center and the four-hour learning center. The two-hour learning center is mostly for children under the age of five, where each child is taught on a one-on-one basis. Apart from teaching the child, the teacher focuses on preparing the child to work in a group environment. In the four hour learning center, group teaching sessions take place everyday. These are continued as long as we feel that the child is benefiting from them. Once we feel that the child has reached his or her learning potential, we guide him/her through an occupational placement program. In this process, we help the child figure out a skill he or she would like to learn and one which we think the child is capable of doing. We refer him/her to vocational training institutes for people with special needs. Thus our aim is to make him/her an independent member of the society.

STEP: What kinds of jobs do these children usually end up with?

SC: All kinds. Traditionally, they went to vocational training centers to learn embroidery, woodwork, etc. But, recently two of my students trained to work at fast food restaurants and are currently working as part of the service staff at these restaurants.

STEP:Which other institutions are currently providing Special Education?

SC: Currently there is mixture of institutions. There are government-run institutions, non-governmental charity organizations, and private institutions. But the number of such institutions is not enough to cater to the demand. And these institutions are usually concentrated in the urban centers of Pakistan.

STEP:What major changes do you think are required in the Special Education sector?

SC: Firstly, I think the training of special education teachers needs to be altered. Currently in Pakistan the only degree offered in Special Education is a Masters degree. No other degree or diploma even has Special Education in its syllabus. In my opinion, Special Education should be introduced as a subject as early as possible. In other countries it is offered as a high-school level subject. For example, Special Education is an O-Level subject but this is not offered to students in Pakistan. The B.Ed degree that most teachers have should certainly require that the holder have some training in dealing with special children. A two-year course is not enough for a person to learn the intricacies of dealing with these children and making special education part of the B.Ed degree would increase the pool of teachers available to teach at Special Education institutions. In fact, if the society as a whole is to learn to accept and include those with special needs, we need to introduce the concept of special needs to children at a primary or secondary school level.

The Masters degree itself needs to be extended to a three year program and should include a year long mandatory internship. Currently, this internship is only a few months long and in my opinion this just isn’t enough. Teaching Special children is a skill best learned in an actual school, and thus greater on-field experience is needed to improve the quality of the graduates.

Secondly the institutions themselves need some changes in the way they are run. It is sad to see when the government offers excellent resources for Special Education but nobody knows how to use them. An example of this is the automatic Braille translation machine. Many institutions have them but they are not being used to their maximum potential. While they could be used to automatically translate large amounts of important material, very few people know how to use them leading them to be used marginally for manually translating text. Teachers are not taught how to operate them, it is a mechanics job to do so. Thus either teachers should be trained how to use these resources or trained personnel should be available to them.

Teachers themselves should pass through a vigorous screening procedure. Due to the mentioned lack of training in special education, most teachers in these schools have no experience or qualifications in teaching Special Children. Thus they have very little knowledge of their physical, psychological, or emotional needs. Another change which is happening on a global level but will take time to be implemented in Pakistan is the elimination of Special Education institutions altogether. Mainstreaming has almost completely replaced Special Education institutions in the developed world. Laws are in place which allow no school to reject a student on the basis of a disability. This way every school has to be prepared to handle a child with special needs. The structure of the schools needs to be such that allows special children to maneuver easily, they have teachers trained to deal with these children and other resources such as special computers and books are available in all schools. The idea of isolating these children is no longer morally or socially acceptable.

STEP: Could you elaborate on the concept of mainstreaming. Has this been adopted by schools in Pakistan?

SC: Mainstreaming defies the idea that children with special needs need to be segregated from other children. There are many benefits that come with doing this. First of all the special child does not feel isolated from the society. This makes it easier for them to become contributing members of the society. By segregating these children we only encourage their role as social outcasts. At this point, some private schools do admit children with special needs but in my experience, the facilities they have are far from satisfactory. They usually allocate a separate room for these children which nullifies the purpose of mainstreaming altogether.

STEP: An advantage of mainstreaming would be the wider acceptance of people with physical or mental disabilities in society. How far do you think the lack of this acceptance is a problem currently?

SC: This is a huge problem in Pakistan. As a therapist, I deal with special children everyday who are intentionally or unintentionally hurt by strangers, peers, and even their own family members. For example, those with visual or hearing impairments are often dealt with as if they have a mental disability, hampering their academic and social development. Even family members are guilty of ridiculing these children. A common example is that of children with Down Syndrome. They are often highly excited by music and can’t help moving enthusiastically when music is played. Family members will use this “trick” to entertain themselves and play music at odd times knowing the child will not be able to restrain himself from dancing. This ridicule has deep repercussions on the child’s development. We need to become mature as a society and learn how to deal with those with special needs in an accepting and respectful manner.

STEP:What are the opportunities available to people with special needs in higher education?

SC: Most universities do not discriminate against applicants because of their disabilities. I know for a fact that there are students with disabilities studying in GCU and FC College. But the number of such students is few. You have to understand that even though there are opportunities available to students to gain higher education, very few have access to good quality primary and secondary education which would make them eligible for higher education.

STEP: Ending on a positive note, could you mention some of the success stories of Special Education in Pakistan?

SC: A major positive step taken by the Musharraf government was to open the CSS examinations to those with special needs. They were allowed assistance in the examination and thus the civil service has now been opened to these people. This is a major step in the right direction since it proves that with the right assistance, those with special needs can be as contributing members of society as those without.

Rising Sun Institute, LRBT, Children’s Hospital are examples of special education institutes that are making a difference. STEP would like to laud their efforts and encourage readers to contribute to institutions like these which are providing education and training to those with special needs in any way they can.

My contention is regarding the purpose of promoting university research in Pakistan. Surely, it cannot be only to solve pressing current socio-economic problems of Pakistan. If that were so, a much better approach, in purely economic terms, would be to setup a few research centers (like the National Labs of United States or centers like KRL, NESCOM, etc.) that hire highly-qualified people to lead a few groups in identified focus areas. These groups can hire local graduate and under-graduate students for thematic research. Moreover, many of the most pressing technological issues facing Pakistan do not need cutting-edge or new research. Many of the problems with our power-, gas- and water-infrastructure have well-known solutions. Even many of the most basic military requirements can be solved locally if proper governmental policies (local business subsidies, tax-breaks, transparency) are implemented, allowing existing technologies to be developed by indigenous companies. Indeed, Pakistan already has companies with the engineering capabilities needed to solve many of our problems. As two examples, Emerging Energy System and Integrated Dynamics can provide solutions in energy and military sectors, respectively. The barriers to such solutions are political, economic, and social, and thus outside the purview of this forum. But, it would be naïve to say that academia can overcome these barriers and deliver solutions to the common-man.  

So, what then is, or should be, the purpose of fostering academic research in Pakistan? On top of building a knowledge-based economy where entrepreneurship springs from academic efforts, there are three other, equally important, reasons to foster academic research.  First, developing and retaining a pool of intellectuals and academics that can enrich any debate and social discourse within the country, and also stop or reverse brain drain. Surely, you cannot have a robust higher education system without retaining and attracting the best.  Secondly, there are pedagogical benefits to inculcating research within universities. A research-active faculty remains up-to-date in their field, benefiting the students while also developing their research skills. Even more so, qualified academics tend to have greater exposure, and a different world view, which can be refreshing for the students, enriching them both personally and socially. Finally, by doing research at the cutting edge, academia can not only identify potential future problems, but also offer solutions when the need arises. As two examples, academic research seeded the development of Atomic bomb by the US in WWII and Britain’s cipher-breaking at Bletchley Park.  

Each of these purposes of fostering research in universities has a long-term and intrinsically unquantifiable benefit. Building a robust research ecosystem should be viewed in a manner similar to a country’s defense; neither has an immediate benefit to the man on the street, yet both are essential for prosperity and progress. 

Turning now to the core ingredient necessary to build and maintain an eco-system for research in universities: recent PhDs. A higher education system is like an automobile, with the policies, universities, and funding agencies the body and engine of the car, but the human resources (academics and students) are the essential fuel that runs the automobile. The more refined the fuel, the more smooth the running. I focus on the needs of young graduates for an important reason: fresh graduates that decide to return to Pakistan align their career prospective with that of their host university and, on a larger scale, with the academic profile of the country.  

However, it appears that the policies of universities and governments are not adequately addressing the need to attract the best and brightest young graduates. HEC has one program for placement of fresh PhDs, whereby eligible PhD’s are guaranteed placement in Pakistani universities for a PKR 80,000 salary. However, this program might paradoxically promote mediocrity, as the brightest returns would anyway be guaranteed placement in the top 5-6 universities in Pakistan.

I contend that while a good salary is a must, we cannot use salary as an incentive to lure and retain our best minds. The fresh graduates wanting to return to Pakistan do so of other-than-monetary motives (patriotism, youthful idealism, family, religion, etc.). In my discussion with recently graduated friends regarding their decision to return, having teaching and research freedom are their top two concerns. The first of these is largely affected by the openness of the universities while the second is related to the policies and constraints set by funding agencies.  

Academic freedom would mean the ability to innovate within their universities in terms of course content. Allowing new experimental courses not only introduces new areas to students but also piques their interest in those areas, potentially helping the faculty in research.  Research freedom means the ability to choose a research area of their choosing, perhaps close to their PhD area of expertise, allowing the use of their skill set developed during graduate research. 

Such research freedom can only be provided if these fresh PhDs are provided with initial, no-strings-attached, funding by either their universities of employment or funding agencies. One possible option would be to offer competitive awards, similar to the NSF CAREER awards, that provide seed-funding to new and aspiring faculty without requiring local or socially relevant research. These can be offered for 3-5 years, with renewal every year after the first two based on performance. Thereafter the research agenda is set by the agencies to shepherd research, in a manner similar to that suggested in Sohaib’s article. Another approach, quite forcefully argued in a DAWN article, would be to develop endowment funds at universities that allow them to support and attract the brightest fresh PhD’s.  

Forcing young PhDs to immediately focus on locally relevant research will in fact be counter-productive. As Sohaib’s article points out quite correctly, young faculty members need confidence and experience to do publishable research that also solves local problems. Another important aspect to consider for these fresh graduates is their remoteness from Pakistan during the 5-7 years of their higher education. Their grasp of local problems will only develop over time. Time is also needed to develop rapport with local researchers to do cross-disciplinary research, typical of a socially-relevant work, that needs collaboration. In fact, any good researcher will, over a period of time, attempt to address local problems even if it requires them to step out of their comfort zones.  

To summarize, while socially-relevant research should be one of the main goals for developing research infrastructure in universities it should be developed for other, equally important, purposes: attracting and retaining the best academics, providing up-to-date course contents, and preparing for unforeseen problems. Furthermore, for the research ecosystem to flourish it requires attracting and keeping the most brilliant minds within Pakistan. For this purpose the aspirations of these academics, and especially the recently graduated and returning PhDs, needs to be taken into account. Thus, a balance needs to be maintained through seeding constraint-free research by junior research faculty, mentoring them towards research benefiting the man-on-the street as their research experience matures.

 Affan Syed is a post doctoral research associate at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California. His research focus is on systems research in terrestrial and underwater sensor networks.  He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National University of Science and Technology, Pakistan in 2000, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Computer Science from University of Southern California in 2004, and 2009 respectively. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

As the new breed of HEC-Funded PhD Scholars joins Pakistani universities, this is a pertinent question to ask. Producing PhDs, whether within Pakistan or abroad, is a significant investment, the cost of which is ultimately borne by the society. Can we assume that, in return, we will see tangible socio-economic benefits from their research, or should the society view the universities as ivory towers with little link to the real problems of Pakistan? After all, with 76% of population living at under $2 per day and 65% of women illiterate, can research spending on network routing protocols or multi-camera tracking algorithms be justified?

There is no doubt that research investments have brought long terms benefits for developed countries. Even research in purely theoretical sciences, such as particle physics, has brought substantial derivative benefits for nations. For the purposes of this article, however, I wish to limit the scope to applied sciences, such as engineering or computer science, disciplines which are supposed to have direct socio-economic benefits rather than just indirect ones.

Young assistant professors are primarily driven by the desire to establish their credentials. Recognition, promotion and awards depend (or should depend) primarily on the quality of their research publications. Hence, the pressure to ‘publish or perish’ can be immense at a good university. Whether these publications will tackle problems of national interest is but a minor concern for a young professor. In the absence of any proactive mechanism of encouraging ‘relevant’ research, professors will publish in areas that are most easy for them to publish in. Often, this is an extension of their PhD problems, regardless of whether those problems have any relevance to our socio-economic context or not.

In fact, one can argue that substantial engagement with Pakistan’s pressing problems may actually be discouraged in practice, perhaps unintentionally so. Molding a practical problem into something publishable at the frontiers of knowledge is not an easy task, and requires considerable skill. Most of our research-active faculty is young, and does not have access to senior research mentors; it is perhaps too much to expect from a fresh PhD to extract ‘hot’ research problems that are rooted in our socio-economic context and are publishable in the top international conferences and journals. This balance can only be learnt from experience. Young professors therefore face a dichotomy: either work on something of relevance but little publishable value, or continue to publish in the area of their PhD research at the cost of socio-economic relevance. The latter option is often the easier path with higher returns in terms of recognition.

Interestingly, professors in developed countries are not challenged by this dichotomy. For one, the mechanisms of mentorship from senior researchers are well developed. However, more importantly, their research eco-system has matured at a national level. Research agendas in applied sciences are primarily driven by funding agencies. Since winning grants is critical for getting tenure, professors are forced to align their research interests with those of the funding agencies. These agencies craft their ‘Requests for Proposals’ (RFPs) very carefully, deriving them from national priorities in the case of public-sector agencies, and commercial interests in the case of private sector donors.

In the US, in addition to funding agencies, the National Academies play an important role in aligning research agendas with national priorities. Being elected as their member is the highest professional achievement and a goal that the best researchers strive for. The National Academies advise the nation on matters of science and technology, harnessing the best minds for this purpose. Policy makers, congressmen and governmental agencies frequently solicit advice from the National Research Council, a division of the National Academies, on matters of technology and its impact on the society. Thus, the best minds in the country directly contribute to setting national priorities and technological agendas through this mechanism.

This maturity of the research eco-system ensures that young researchers are contributing towards the nation’s socio-economic development while working towards their personal career goals. Hence, in the US, if a graduate student is working on network protocols or multi-camera tracking, one can trace a direct link of that research with either the commercial interest of a company funding that research or the priority of a public sector funding agency such as DARPA or NSF. However, when this student graduates and returns to Pakistan, the same research agenda may turn out to be out-of-place in our socio-economic context.

Why then does the researcher not shift agendas to suit our context better? There are many reasons. A clear mechanism of aligning national priorities with research goals is missing due to the immaturity of the research eco-system. Availability of research grants programs, such as the NRPU or National ICT R&D Fund, is a relatively new phenomenon, and it seems that there is more money than capable researchers. Hence, restricting funding to certain areas does not make sense right now. Moreover, the pressure to publish restricts us to our comfort zones. Jumping into an unfamiliar area is difficult even for seasoned researchers. There has to be a strong incentive to do so, perhaps in terms of research funding or recognition.

Yet, any person of conscience cannot turn a blind eye the pressing problems that our nation faces. All Pakistanis, more so those who have had the privilege of studying to the highest level, must play their role in bringing the country out of its current quagmire. If the best researchers get together to study the issue of, say, non-availability of clean drinking water, I am sure that some solid output will emerge. It would not matter whether the researcher is a computer scientist or an economist or a chemical engineer – all have a role to play in solving such mega problems.

So should a researcher give up the urge to publish in top international journals in the desire to contribute to national agendas? This is a tricky question. Good quality publications are the primary credentials by which a researcher is known, similar to valor medals that a soldier so proudly displays. They sift the fluff from the serious players. A researcher will lose credibility if he or she does not have an excellent publication record. Therefore, a researcher cannot, and indeed should not, use the ‘relevance’ argument as an excuse for poor quality of publications.

Yet in my experience, once a person delves deep into a problem, be that any problem, he or she soon reaches the frontier of knowledge, where fundamental contributions are publishable. The key skill required by the researcher is to dig out the fundamental (and unsolved) problems from a practical application. The motivation may come from the practical area, say, the traffic congestion problem or the non-availability of clean water. However, the publications will come from those fundamental unsolved sub-problems which require extending the scientific frontier. Hence, with a little bit of skill and substantial mentorship, the dichotomy that I mentioned earlier may be avoided – one can have the best of both worlds. However, it is critical to have the perspective of the overarching socio-economic context of one’s research; so that we are not just creating new projects and publications, but rather developing real solutions.

One argument often put forth by university researchers is that the public sector is not mature enough to absorb or appreciate the need for research. My personal experience, on the contrary, has been quite opposite to this conventional wisdom. I have found a wide spectrum of government organizations to be extraordinarily open about discussing national problems, and appreciating the need for well-thought-out solutions. However, the key word here is ‘solutions’. Government officials dealing with mega problems on a daily basis have little patience for ‘ivory tower’ research discourse or intellectual discussions. They need real solutions, and appreciate them more than what we, the professors, normally expect from them. Once while working on a project for a defense sector organization, I asked a manager why his organization had never funded a research project in a university before. The reason is two-fold, he said. Firstly there was never a need earlier, because the public sector itself used to be an attractive employer and always managed to hire the best talent; but more so, because, in his opinion, the universities had never demonstrated any substantial skill that would enable him to develop better solutions.

I would like to conclude with some practical recommendations for policy makers to encourage relevant research:

• Funding Agencies: It is critical for funding agencies to be cognizant of the needs of country, and to mold their RFPs and review processes to be aligned with our national priorities. They should involve major national stakeholders, including senior researchers and policy makers, into developing the RFPs. It is not uncommon to find senior researchers employed at NSF and DARPA as consultants: It is largely their vision that shapes the RFPs and hence guides the researchers in that area.
• Mentorship: Vice-chancellors, Deans and senior faculty members should appreciate the importance of mentoring younger faculty towards projects that fit well in Pakistan’s socio-economic context.
• Proactive Outreach: Universities must develop the capacity to interface with the field-players: government departments, NGOs, citizen groups and policy makers, so that their research gets channeled in appropriate directions. One example of such a policy is encouraging faculty to use their sabbatical leaves to work in Pakistan’s public or private sector, to develop strong linkages. (Universities which do not have a sabbatical leave policy should institute one for research active faculty).
• Encouraging Multi-disciplinary Research Teams: Complex real-world problems are inherently multidimensional, and real solutions rarely require just a single type of expertise. Multi-disciplinary research teams that bridge the gap between engineers and social scientists, computing professionals and economists must be encouraged by universities.
• Recognition: A system of rewards, based on the impact of research, should be instituted by universities as well as by professional bodies such as the IEEE Chapters or the Higher Education Commission. The practical impact of research should be taken into account during promotion decisions.

So when will the man on the street start to benefit from research in computer science or engineering? Researchers of applied sciences should view this question as a challenge – and start thinking about creating solutions for the tough problems that our country faces.  The ball is in our court, so to say. Rather than the mindset of creating newer projects and better publications around our field of specialization, we should start thinking about creating solutions that work in our socio-economic context. After all, PhD can be viewed as training to tackle tough problems, not only the ones that fit just right in our comfort zones, but even those that challenge and stretch us in unexpected directions.