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.

Umar Saif, associate professor at LUMS, has been selected as a Young Innovator under 35 by Technology Review magazine, published by MIT. His work has been cited for improving connectivity in poor nations.

“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!

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.

In a country where a quarter of the population lives under the poverty line, and millions of children who should be enlightening themselves with knowledge spend their childhood working in shabby workshops, it’s not surprising that people aspire to improve the condition of the country or their particular surroundings. One such example is Project Topi, a student-run organization that works for the uplift of the remote village of Topi where Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology (GIKI) is situated. The organization is independently run by the students of GIKI, with Dr. Tariq Saeed as the faculty adviser. 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 »

Possibilities Pakistan has entered the Dell Social Innovation Competition, and is competing for the prize ($50,000), which will be used to fund the printing of their magazine and the expansion of their services. You can help Possibilities Pakistan win the prize by voting at: www.possibilitiespakistan.org/vote.

One reason so few Pakistani students are able to receive a quality education abroad is a lack of college application guidance in Pakistan. Each year, Pakistani students who are highly qualified and should be accepted to excellent colleges and universities abroad are unable to capitalize on their potential because they cannot navigate the increasingly complex college application process. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Shaukhat Hammed Khan is the Executive Director of Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST), the parent body of GIK Institute. A nuclear physicist by training, he recently served as the Rector of GIKI and member of the Planning Commission. In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Khan we talk about GIKI — its vision and its future, his work on lasers and much more. Part 1 of our conversation is here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Very few scientists are able to successfully navigate the road between a research lab, academic administration, and the government. Shaukhat Hameed Khan is certainly one scientist who has. An Oxford-trained nuclear physicist, Dr. Khan started the first group working on lasers at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1969. During the proceeding four decades, he contributed to the nation’s nuclear program, served as the Rector of Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, and as a member of the Planning Commission. Dr. Khan now serves as the Executive Director of Society for the Promotion of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan (SOPREST), the parent body of GIK Institute. In this two-part interview, we talk about higher education, HEC, GIKI and much more.

Let’s start by talking about the recent funding crisis at the HEC and the universities. Do the universities have a point that current funding is simply inadequate? Is there a way out?

The Universities are quite vulnerable as regards their development budgets, which are frozen except for the projects nearing completion. I believe considerable funds have been released for their operational expenditures and the critical moment is over.

I must point out that while the HEC has done excellent work by focusing on developing the physical and intellectual infrastructure and hence access to higher education, this growth cannot continue at such a high rate indefinitely. The Universities have been conditioned by HEC to expect funding increases every year, with few serious reviews in place. In fact, (until recently) HEC was expecting 20-26 % increase in funds annually for the foreseeable future, which was simply not sustainable.

The recent funding crisis was foreseen earlier, and the HEC was cautioned as far back in 2007 by the Planning Commission – where I looked after Higher Education – to pause and consolidate, to slow down expansion, and concentrate on quality matters, which is perhaps more important than mere numbers. After all the only deliverable from a University is its graduates and their competence and ability in meeting the demands of the very competitive 21st century. This does not mean, as some have suggested recently, that the HEC and Universities should not have received large funding at all. However, this crisis has thrown up the opportunity for a major review of the HEC itself, and address the issues of its organizational efficiency, and decision framework. Of particular importance are activities related to funding for research, accreditation, and rankings which needs to be reviewed for potential conflict of interest. This is extremely urgent under the new devolution regime.

Please remember that Pakistan is not unique in facing this problem. Higher education and its funding is in crisis everywhere. This is why Western Universities solicit students from countries such as Pakistan so that they can continue to subsidize their own students one way or the other. Coming now to the present, even without a financial crisis as at present, this tapering off of funds would have happened, but it should have been gentler and more gradual. With the economy being badly hit by several factors such as the global crisis in financial sector, inflation in fuel and food prices, war in Afghanistan next door, and now the floods; all have heightened the fragility of governance and macroeconomic instability.

The current stress on the Universities is expected to continue.

What is the way out?

First, reduce costs, and mobilize other resources simultaneously, with a moratorium on new development projects for at least 3-4 years. The word should be: Consolidate. There is just not enough faculty to allow further expansion, and the result of this shortage is that we have a ‘teach – hop – teach’ syndrome exploited by roaming ‘visiting faculty’. While a few thousand PhDs will no doubt be joining Pakistani universities in the near future, I do not buy into the argument that a freshly returned PhD , no matter how talented, must also be a good teacher.

Ultimately it comes down finally to increasing internal efficiencies. Increase the student: teacher ratios to 25 instead of 18 to one, and reduce the very high ratio of non-teaching staff to total staff in Universities. This hasn’t changed much over the years and need to come down to 1:1 from the current 3:1 Perhaps more mergers may be the answer, as there are too many small, non-critical, and hence inefficient institutions operating in Pakistan. Hardly any University has enrollment on its own campus(es) of 15,000 to 25,000 students. I ignore affiliated colleges, which offer two year degrees.

Given the funding shortfall we’re likely to face even in the future, isn’t increasing the tuition fee a prudent option? Shouldn’t public universities be responsible for generating at least some significant portion of their operating expenditure?

Public universities certainly need to generate more funds themselves, and should also be more prudent in expenditures, because the desired funds will just not be available. Let me give you an idea of the expected shortfall. According to the HEC’s  Medium Term  Development Framework (MTDF 2005-2015) the projected expenditures are  Rs 1150 billion over this period.  The resultant shortfall would be nearly Rs 600 billion unless  additional resources are harnessed, as pointed out by the World Bank in late 2006. Such expenditures are neither feasible nor justified given the national  tax : GDP ratio  of only about 10%. The matter is made worse by the increasing burden of pensions and major increase in emoluments of all employees.

What are the possible solutions?

First, the HEC must slow down the pace of development and expansion, and should stop any new programmes for 4-5 years.

Second, there is no choice but to increase tuition fees, which is admittedly likely to result in higher unit costs / student apart from slowing the growth in enrolment and increasing the inequities already existing in the country’s education structure. On the other hand, it is argued that Higher Education provides an economic advantage to those who get it, and no fees (or low fees) gives an unfair economic facility to those who can afford to pay.

This is not easy to implement, as it is linked with the sensitive question about how much cost recovery is reasonable. All public universities should be encouraged to progressively generate at least 50% of their operational expenses within five years, coupled with rigorous means testing for financial assistance in order to preserve some equity. The concept of interest-free student loans from an expanded Student Fund needs to be visited, with the loans being paid back after obtaining jobs.

Thirdly, we need to recall our traditional concept of waqf through land being attached to universities for their upkeep. All our major mosques and madrassa have such endowments. Oxford and Cambridge are the biggest landlords in the UK while land-grant universities in the USA have also been quite successful. Some Pakistani universities have plenty of spare land even after decades of existence, and can use some of it to generate some revenues. Vertical physical growth will also be more efficient in space utilization. This also means raising and managing endowment funds from alumni and businessmen.

Fourthly, HEC needs to improve its own internal efficiencies as well as of universities (student teacher ratios, faculty: non-faculty numbers, better trained and educated administrative personnel). While the operational costs of HEC are of the order of 3% of its operational funding of universities, it is too high when the sheer disparity in its personnel numbers versus all the universities is taken into account.

Fifth, the HEC needs to revisit all the incentives it offered to university faculty for doing research and supervising PhD students. This may no longer be valid now with much enhanced faculty salaries, and will reduce the operating costs considerably.

Sixth, the student numbers being sent abroad for MS or PhD need to be reduced in the proportion of the returning PhD scholars from abroad, as more and more PhD work should be done progressively within the country.

All these measures have to be applied simultaneously.

What do you make of the role that the private sector is playing in higher education in Pakistan? Current and likely future funding shortfalls for public sector universities will likely increase the role that private universities are playing? How can that be managed better?

The private sector is already very active in higher education, with some 35 % of enrollment, and 60 private universities as against 75 public institutions. It can make even greater contribution by reducing the burden on the public exchequer, specially in the present crisis, where its role can be more efficient in providing access to higher education. Even though private Institutions are generally smaller, and more expensive, their graduates such as from GIKI and LUMS  are well regarded by academia, business and industry.

It would be necessary to provide the private sector a more level playing field by making them eligible for state R& D funds, which should be neutral and depend only on the quality of proposal. At the same time, they will need they need to submit to greater regulation, scrutiny,  and transparency in quality and financial matters, in regard to full-time faculty and the exemption from income tax.

In our interview with Dr. Asad Abidi, he talked about the importance of vocational training and how most of the industrial economies were built on vocational training. Why hasn’t that happened in Pakistan? And, would establishing vocational training institutions not have been a better investment of public funds than sending students for PhDs, funding research at local universities,  and other programs that HEC started ?

I agree entirely with Dr Asad Abidi.  We cannot increase our economic envelope without raising our collective competence, which alone will ensure our breaking out of the low skills, low productivity, low expectations trap. Just 1% of our 12-17 age group are enrolled in some skill-development programme as compared with, say, Turkey which enrolls nearly 21% of this age cohort.  Why is this so? It is not glamorous enough. We have more doctors than nurses and more engineers than technicians. However, it is not an either-or situation.

We have to improve the quality of students entering University; even more important we need to make secondary education economically relevant, which requires rapid increase in funding for schools and colleges.

We now need to move beyond merely higher education and focus on schools and colleges, specially the neglected transition link between school education and economically relevant skills. After all the knowledge worker in the 21st Century is as much the switchboard operator, or the admissions clerk in a college or the person behind the sales counter or the fisherman and farm worker, as is a PhD.

I feel that the vocationalisation of secondary education (class 8-10) with one or more vocational tracks offered to complement traditional schooling will help reduce school dropouts and improve productivity. It will also make our young people more employable, and keep them away from social distress and mischief. When I left GIKI as Rector, I went back briefly to the Planning Commission and managed to produce a policy paper on expanding quality and relevance of vocational/technical education. This has been accepted by the CDWP and also recently accepted by USAID one of three major reforms needed in Pakistan’s education sector.

Do remember that university and vocational training are not an either-or choice. Both are essential, and with universities now approaching a certain threshold, it is possible to shift the focus to the neglected technical training sector.

I estimate that it will cost a fifth per student per year for a technical diploma /certificate as compared with a university undergraduate degree, with earlier economic returns.

In Part 2 of our conversation with Dr. Shaukhat Hameed Khan we talk about GIKI and Dr. Khan’s experience working as the Rector of GIKI.

On the night of 15th of October, I felt so proud to be a Pakistani, which is now a rare thing, in Kula Lumpur Convention Center (KLCC) where Pakistan IT companies clinched seven silver APICTA-2010 Awards and Center for Advanced Research in Engineering (CARE) making history by winning three out of them in the key categories of Security, e-Government and Communication applications. This clearly shows the innovative and creative minds of our IT gurus, entrepreneurs and executives. The best products from the sixteen countries in sixteen categories were competing for the gold and silver positions. The award decisions were made based on the uniqueness of the products, their business potential and their utility in the economies of the alliance countries.

Pakistan IT companies have done wonders and the credit goes to respective teams. The engineers and scientists in all these companies have made all of us proud to be Pakistanis. Please keep up the good work, you are producing innovations that are being celebrated and appreciated in the entire Asia Pacific region. Your work does not only have great intellectual value but also business potential.

Here is a small narration of the events I wrote while I was flying back to Pakistan.

It was the morning of 15th Oct, I, Zaheer and Hammad (the CARE team members) were visiting Putrajaya, a Malaysian city that hosts the federal government offices including the office of the Prime Minster. The city is newly built and offers an exotic sky line with dominant presence of domes of two elegant mosques that shows Muslims’ grace, significance and power in the country. Zaheer’s family friend Dr Amir (who teaches in a university in Malaysia) and his family took us around. It was Friday and we offered our prayers in one of these mosques and then rushed back to Kula Lumpur, where Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Alliance (APICTA), an alliance of sixteen countries, was holding its 10th ICT awards and we were representing Pakistan in four categories. Some of the finest countries in technology constitute the Asia Pacific Alliance; these include Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan. There were a total of sixteen categories and in each category each country was represented by the winner of its national ICT award.  CARE earlier made history by winning P@SHA awards in four key categories where one award in student’s category was also claimed by students of CASE, so a total of five awards.

We were back in Kula Lumpur by 3 pm where the awards were scheduled at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. To make sure that I know the exact timings I, for the very first time, looked at the invitation card and got the first shock of the day reading that the chief guest at the event was the Prime Minister of Malaysia, and Dr. Mahatar Mohammad would be receiving first APICTA Life Time achievement award.

I could hardly believe that ICT would be given its due recognition and importance in a Muslim country.  The P@SHA Awards, one the most prominent events in ICT in Pakistan, lacks the presence of any key government official. Our print media did not report on the Awards, although the next day there were news of primary school’s award ceremonies and big pictures of fun fairs at a local university.  It was only the Dawn news channel that repeatedly broadcasted the news on the event.

While I was hurriedly preparing to participate in the ceremony, the scenes and events of past few weeks started to scroll off my memory. Mr. Zia Imran, chairman PSEB (Pakistan Software Export Board) stressing Dr. Farrukh to send our nominations for P@SHA ICT Awards and Ms Jehan Ara (President, P@SHA) sending mass emails on pakgrid inviting all ICT ventures in Pakistan to participate in the awards. Dr. Farrukh kept reminding me on daily basis to respond, I asked Shaista to hunt the managers of different projects, as only two days were left, and get them to fill the nomination forms.  The managers, as they always are, up to their nose in work and commitments, managed to fill the forms and we submitted nominations in four categories in the last hour of the last day. The nominations came to us as just another fire fighting episode. And to our utmost pleasant surprise, I received an email from Jehan Ara that we had made history and managed to sweep the awards. We won in all four categories and one group of CASE students also won, so a total of five awards. The award in the R&D category was for a joint project of CARE, CASE, and College of E&ME funded by the National ICT R&D Fund. The rest of the three categories were communication, security and e-government. We were told that the same projects had also been nominated for APICTA award in Malaysia. We applied for visas, not sure till last day if we would be going. Eventually, three of us could manage to board the flight to Kula Lumpur and two were left behind still waiting for their visas to be processed.

We landed on 13th and the next day we were to present our projects to a panel of judges in two categories. We spent all night preparing and giving last touches to the presentation, making people back in our office in Pakistan to also work on the presentation. With team work, we were able to  put the presentation together.  Our first presentation was in the category of e-government. We made an excellent pitch, as was evident from judges’ response. Initially there was disbelief that turned into astonishment and finally into recognition and appreciation of the innovations we created in Pakistan. The head judge was an Australian lady though I knew in my heart that it would be hard for the judges to counter their natural bias and overcome the prejudice to award us the gold but they could not deny us the silver. Our next presentation was in two hours in the R&D category. This judge from Hong Kong remained in the state of disbelief and could never come out. He doubted that our device can do one million matches per second. We knew, we have lost this category as he created doubts in the minds of other judges as well. Dejected by the comments, we came back to our rooms, slept for a while and then were up to prepare for next day. Two presentations, the first one in Security application, we again made an excellent pitch, answered all questions, though the proceedings again started from disbelief to appreciation and commendation. The judges took my visiting cards and we wrongly perceived that we had clinched the gold. The head judge was again an Australian lady and there was an Australian company also presetting their product just before us. Our last presentation was in an hour and in the Communication Systems category. Out performance in this category was flawless and immaculate, and left the judges shaking their heads in appreciation. We were wrongly sure that the gold was ours.

It took me some time to come back to reality, and enjoy the next event. The appearance of Dr Mohatir Muhammad and the Prime Minister of Malaysia increased the significance of the awards. The show was ‘on’ Oscar-style, hosted by two of the most renowned celebrities of Malaysia, I was told by the Malaysian sitting next to me. To my surprise, the front lines were filled with primary school kids and so we were in the back lines. The compere told the kids that you were brought here to be inspired and do better than what all these people have done. This indeed reflects the importance Malaysia gives to ICT. The first award was in the category of security. Once the announcer said and “the winner is”, Zaheer told me “Sir, let us get ready”, but to our disappointment the gold was bestowed to the Australian, and we were dejected. But the next announcement of silver was for us. This also helped us in lowering our expectations. We were happy to have won three awards, and the rest of the Pakistani delegation won four more, so a total of seven awards for Pakistan. This indeed is an immaculate performance by the Pakistani IT industry, in general, and CARE in particular. The credit indeed goes to all the developers and managers of in these companies. Keep up the good work, it made us proud as a Pakistani among so many people, professionals and IT companies present at the scene. The winners were:

Security Application – Silver, Merit
Product: 10G VoIP Monitoring Solution
Center for Advanced Research in Engineering

e-Health Application – Silver, Merit
Product: CureMD
Cure MD Pvt Ltd

E-Inclusion and E-Community – Silver, Merit
Product: Automated Business Machines
Aerocar Transaction Machines

E-Inclusion and E-Community Application – Silver, Merit
Product: Touch XS
Solo Tech

Financial Industry Applications – Silver, Merit
Product: Rendezvous 4.0
Avanza Solutions

Communications – Silver, Merit
Product: Software Defined Radio
Center for Advanced Research in Engineering

E-Government – Silver, Merit
Product: CARE Digital Radio Surveillance Equipment
Center for Advanced Research in Engineering

To my pleasant surprise, I saw all the Pakistani participants being very helpful, and there was harmony and affections among them. P@SHA chairperson, Jehan Ara ably lead the delegates. I had seen her team working day and night with passion and conviction. We need this type of leadership in the country as well.

Dr. Shoab A. Khan has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He is a founding member of Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE) and CEO of Center for Advanced Research in Engineering (CARE). CASE is a primer engineering institution and runs the largest post graduate engineering program in the country, whereas CARE has risen to be one of the most profound high technology engineering organizations in Pakistan.

Dr. Khan is actively involved in research and development and has 5 awarded US patents and 160+ international publications. His book on digital design is in publishing by John Willey & Sons.  He has been awarded Tamgh-e-Imtiaz, National Education Award (2001), and NCR National Excellence Award in the category of IT Education.

Academic colloquia and lectures are an integral part of any university environment as they help spread new ideas and facilitate interaction between researchers and students. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: A general discussion page on the GRE requirement introduced by the HEC exists here.

In 2005, the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan imposed the requirement of clearing the GRE Subject Test prior to admission in the PhD programs. Students who were enrolled in the PhD programs at the time were required to clear the GRE Subject Test before submission of their theses. This article discusses the interpretation of the word “clear” used by the HEC , the fairness of this criteria, and the deficiencies in policies regarding the GRE Subject Test. We conclude that by imposing this requirement, HEC has created problems for students living far from big cities, those who do not have access to credit or debit cards, and those who cannot afford the hefty (approximately, Rs. 14,000) registration fee. In addition, the HEC team seemed unaware of the true mechanism of the GRE Subject Test, and as a result significant confusion exists as to what “clearing” the test really means.

Much of the text is taken from the HEC official letters and the GRE guides and the letters published by ETS.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is heavily influenced by Paul Lockhart’s brilliant article, ‘A mathematician’s lament’. I only hope to add my experiences as a Pakistani student to back his stance in the debate over Mathematics Education.

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.