STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Editors Note: Dr. Tauseef Aized is a professor at the University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Lahore and a research fellow at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of STEP.

With the advent of the industrial revolution, the traditional role of higher learning institutions has been transformed from simply educating young people to creating and disseminating knowledge to the whole society. Every higher education institution needs enormous financial resources that, in our system, are typically provided through public funding. The state demands a return on its investment beyond traditional manpower development. Read the rest of this entry »

Pakistan has been rated a ‘Rising Star’ in research multiple times over the last couple of years by ScienceWatch.com, a Thompson Reuters website which tracks trends and performance in research by analyzing its database of scientific papers and citations. The ‘Rising Star’ rankings are published every two months to acknowledge new entrants, by identifying the scientists, institutions, countries, and journals which have shown the largest percentage increase in total citations.  In the May issue of the ratings, Pakistan was named a ‘rising star’ in two areas, ‘Materials Science’ and ‘Plant & Animal Science’. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the second of this two part interview, the scope of the HEC’s mandate and its policy-making procedures are discussed. The interview concludes with Dr. Naqvi’s vision for the future of the HEC.

STEP: Do you think that the HEC has taken too much on its plate? It is directly involved in curriculum setting, hiring and firing professors, setting up distance education classrooms, and even assessing universities. Should the HEC delegate some of these tasks?

SN: We definitely should delegate some of these tasks and we are now actively involved in trying to distance ourselves from institutions of programs. Earlier, we got involved with so many of these things because nobody was doing them nor did we have any mechanism for them, for example, foreign faculty hiring. Actually, Faculty hiring should be done by universities as per best practices, where the universities themselves identify the qualified personnel, negotiate their salaries, and provide them incentives to join the faculty. Universities are fully capable of doing that but they were not doing it. Which is why we had to get involved in the execution of a lot of programs. The scholarship program is another example that comes to mind. But we are now shifting our focus. For example, we are shifting the scholarship program so that it now needs to be run by the universities as per best practices. So there was a need to build the capacities of the universities to perform best practices and have good governance. There are other small sized agencies that are not doing enough and are not widespread enough. For example, the HEC has not been involved in the domain of colleges at the moment, and we are criticized on various forums that we should be. But it is a capacity issue; the HEC can only do so much. It is an evolving organization as any living organization has to be. We took on the tasks that nobody else had done before. There were things we needed to do ourselves to get things started. We have designed a lot of these things so that they would start moving at an arm’s length over time and ultimately become independent entities away from the HEC. So the answer to your question is that yes, we could delegate but at times we need to build the organization to which we can delegate.

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Editor’s Note: Since the establishment of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in 2002, the higher education sector in Pakistan has undergone a transformation both in its size and its nature. Dr. Sohail Naqvi, the Executive Director of the HEC, has been at the helm of many of these changes. STEP’s student editor Mariyam Khalid recently sat down with Dr. Naqvi to learn more about the HEC and its mandate. In the first of this two-part interview, the performance of the HEC, the local relevance of research and other key issues regarding research in Pakistan are examined.

STEP: You have worked as a professor, as a dean, as an industrial entrepreneur and now as a policy-maker in the government. Which of these roles did you find the most rewarding?

SN: I find the one that I’m doing now the most rewarding because of its ability to influence so many factors pertaining to education in Pakistan. But I do miss the university environment, especially the interaction with students. I’ve always loved teaching and being in the classroom. In fact, I sometimes catch myself talking to my colleagues as if I’m lecturing them! So that’s definitely something that I do miss. There is a freedom in being a professor that is simply not available in any other job. When I’ve had it with administration, I can always go back to being a professor. Read the rest of this entry »

IEEE INMIC 2009 is being organized once again, this time by the folks at MAJU and UET, Taxila:

IEEE INMIC is held every year and INMIC 2009 will be the 13th in the series. INMIC has become Pakistan’s flagship technical conference with a broad scope, thereby inviting interest of a large audience. The conference targets research presentations by academic and professional researchers, and also includes a series of tutorials, enabling participants to learn about the latest trends in technology. Research contributions are expected from the participants, covering various disciplines under IEEE’s domain, including technical papers, panel discussions, tutorials and project exhibitions. For all submitted papers, the review criteria include significance of the problem, novelty, clarity, completeness, and accuracy.

As a venue for research, a multi-topic conference like this one is necessarily going to have substandard work: researchers with good work aren’t going to publish here because the audience will not be able to fully appreciate their contribution, and the related scientific sub-community (who would cite their work) aren’t going to be in attendance and therefore won’t be aware of the research. Read the rest of this entry »

The Higher Education Commission’s recent efforts to increase the research output of Pakistani universities has resulted in an increasing number of publications in reputed journals and conferences (a comparison of recent research output of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India is available here). However, this success has also been accompanied with increasing instances of plagiarism involving Pakistani Professors and students. HEC deserves praise for its swift and strict  response to these cases.

In the last couple of years, a number of online services and software have become available for plagiarism detection. An evaluation of available anti-plagiarism services conducted by the Claremont McKenna College is available online. However, till now,  the subject of plagiarism and its automatic detection was not systematically studied by the academia itself. This has finally changed, with the announcement of the first  “International Competition on Plagiarism Detection“. The competition carries a prize of 500 Euros, and will be hosted by the PAN workshop under the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing 2009.

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A recent paper by Dr Asim Khwaja (Harvard) and Dr Atif Mian (U of Chicago), with graduate student Prashant Bharadwaj, is an excellent example of quantitative social science research on a locally relevant issue. Titled “The Big March: Migratory Flows After the Partition of India”, the paper analyzes archival records to answer questions about the volume of people who migrated to India or Pakistan at the time of the partition in 1947.

This is a controversial topic, to say the least. Estimates of those who died in the process vary significantly across sources, especially depending on the national or religious affiliations of the source. More importantly, there have hardly been any scientific studies of perhaps the most significant event in the history of the subcontinent.

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