STEP – Science, Technology, and Education in Pakistan

Editor's Note: Dr. Qasim Sheikh heads the National Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Research and Development Fund. Operating under the Ministry of Information Technology, the Fund envisions a transformation of Pakistan’s economy “into a knowledge-based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable, and effective ICT initiatives”. Prior to joining National ICT R& D Fund, Dr. Sheikh was a faculty member at FAST-NU Islamabad. STEP Editors Sohaib Khan and Khurram Shafique recently sat down with Dr. Sheikh to talk about the Fund during his visit to Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

On the History of the Fund

STEP Editors: Let’s start with the history of the Fund, if you can tell us a little bit about it. We understand that it was in a dormant state before it was revitalized.

Dr. Qasim Shaikh, CEO, National ICT R&D Fund:

Yes, it was in a dormant state but, as I tell my team, I don’t think that we are the opening batsmen of this team.  Actually, the Fund was created when PTCL was the only telecom operator (in the country). I think, and somebody has to correct me, that the key person who pushed (that) some of the PCTL’s earnings should go into research and development in Pakistan, like Bell Labs at ATT, was Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman. Then the Deregulation Act was passed and in the Deregulation Act it was mandatory that every telecom operator will have to contribute 0.5% of their revenue to the Fund. That included internet service providers as well, not just the large service providers. Since there were more contributors to the Fund than just PTCL, it didn’t make sense for it to stay within PTCL. So, it was taken out of PTCL and created as National ICT R&D Fund.

It’s true that under PTCL it was difficult to provide funding and it was in a dormant state but a lot of credit has to go to the top political and bureaucratic management of Ministry of Science and Technology that created this PTCL R&D Fund. Awais Laghari, who was the minister of MoIT, was very instrumental in pushing this National ICT R&D Fund.  So that’s how I was introduced to the Fund. When I saw the earlier vision proposed for the Fund, it was like few lines of ‘create alternative source of energy, etcetera’. I was very fortunate to get an opportunity to give my thoughts towards the vision and about a year later, I was lucky and very privileged to be appointed at the CEO’s position.  Since then, we’ve been trying to push things and have done a few things right and a lot of things wrong (laughter).

STEP: Our understanding is that no other industry has an equivalent fund.

QS: Actually, I found out that it’s not true; for example, the healthcare industry has a similar fund to which all pharmaceutical companies contribute.

STEP: Is it true that the Fund generates a billion rupees a year?

QS: Yes, about a billion rupees a year.

STEP: Are we able to spend that effectively?

QS: We have about 2.5 to 3 billion rupees in our bank. We try to distribute it with corporate efficiency but at the end of the day, the requirements of transparency and the requirements of accountability that must be there, since we distribute public money, are slowing things down. That’s one factor.  Second factor that’s slowing things down is that it is taking us time to create the capacity for research and development in the country. These two factors are extremely important and they are the key bottlenecks we have right now.

I think that transparency and fairness must be maintained even if takes us a little time to disburse funds made available to us by Telecom operators. As far as the capacity is concerned we are trying to build an ICT eco-system that does innovation-centric R&D. This is really a paradigm shift for our ICT research community. Publishing papers should be a result of solving important problems. Publishing papers regardless of the impact of that research in solving real industrial problems is not the key thing that our Fund supports. We’re happy that papers are published and publishing papers is an indicator of quality of work, but our objective is innovation-centric research and development.

On Vision of the Fund

STEP: But, building an eco-system to do innovation-centric R&D from scratch is a very difficult objective to achieve, isn’t it?

QS: You are very right, we did not really have a research and development eco-system within the country and we have made it even more difficult by saying, do innovation-centric R&D. So, we were behind to start with and we’ve put our goals even further.

(The way we address this problem is that) we force people who submit proposals to us to not just think about the problem that they are trying to solve, but also the value-chain that they are after, the key bottlenecks in the value-chain, and the state of the art in removing the bottlenecks in the value-chain. The value-chain does not have to be 100% within Pakistan. So, for example, if you can create employment opportunities in Pakistan by solving an IT problem of the West or Africa or Australia; that’s significant activity as far as we understand.

STEP: This value-chain, does it have to be in terms of benefit to the industry or to the people of Pakistan?

QS: It has to be of the benefit of the people of Pakistan. Typically, it goes through industry. Typically, you deliver solutions through industry. But, then, you deliver solutions through academia as well. Some of our most successful projects are in removing bottlenecks in our education. For example, we’ve had two significant bottlenecks in our IT education. One is the lack of mentors for the final year projects. LUMS is very fortunate that it has significant faculty and it has a significantly good ratio of faculty versus students. But that’s not true at all universities in Pakistan. Final year projects are a very important component of our education system, and in a large number of universities students literally have to knock from door to door and beg companies for final year projects. And, typically, they’ll get a project to develop a database for the company.

The second bottleneck was teaching software engineering. How do you teach software engineering principles to a student who has never written more than a thousand lines of code and those too not in a project? These were two very significant bottlenecks (in our IT education that we are working to remove).

STEP: This is a very interesting thought but, the vision of your Fund highlights research and development. Would you like to say something about the scope of the Fund because what you have described above sounds very different from the Fund’s vision?

QS: Actually, I think that in the Third World, the term ‘R&D’ should be called D, R&D. The first ‘D’ is also for development. R&D at Stanford, Berkley, Caltec and MIT shines because there are a few hundred thousand engineers around these universities who are involved in development and are implementing the state of the art. It is, therefore, possible for this large number of highly qualified engineers to provide problems to professors who can then do just ‘R’ and extend state of the art. But, in Pakistan’s context, our universities do not have the industry support system that US universities have. Therefore, we really have to do ‘D’ in parallel so that R&D (can be done) in Pakistan.

STEP: Since we are in the process of building a research eco-system right now, do you think it would be easier to have focused solicitations of proposals as opposed to generic solicitations where the need and value of the research is already taken care of by some member of either the industry or the agency which requires that?

QS: I think that’s a very valid question. And, the Fund’s operational manuals and guidelines mandate that. The important thing is that this is such a new organization within the context of Pakistan that we have to first find out the lay of the land. So, basically, in last two years or so, what we have done is that we have funded unsolicited proposals. Through those proposals, we have realized roughly six areas in which we have manpower and some semblance of an eco-system in Pakistan.  My favorite phrase is that we’re not going to play ice-hockey in Pakistan; we’re going to play field hockey in Pakistan. So, we had to first find out what specialized R&D our eco-system can support.  Now we’re in a position to push a few thematic areas.

STEP: What are these thematic areas?

QS: One of the key areas that I want to push is telecom operations. I’m specifically saying telecom operations because I don’t think we should go after telecom equipment at this point; we should go after telecom operations. People get emotional about this issue for various justifiable reasons but just take the example of the airline industry. There’s Boeing and Airbus that design and manufacture large jet planes and a few companies in South Africa, Brazil and Europe that make propeller-based planes, and the rest of the industry is dominated by airlines. Fortunately, Pakistan has an amazing combination of companies for telecom operations in Pakistan. The largest telecom operator in the world, Mobile China, has operations in Pakistan. One of the oldest telecom companies in the world, Telenor has a large network in Pakistan. Other important companies such as Singtel, Eitesalat also have operations in Pakistan.   So, we have a very interesting eco-system and we’re at a stage where these significant Telecom companies are in a position to give direction to state of the art R&D in telecom operations and design of new services.

The second (key area) is developing and scaling sustainable solutions to deliver international quality education by leveraging information communication technologies. This is so important that if we do not go in this direction, we do not have an iota of a chance to solve Pakistan’s problems.

STEP: You are talking about things like MIT’s Open CourseWare?

QS: No, way beyond that. In my mind, if I could wish one thing for Pakistan’s education system it would be that every child who goes to school in Pakistan is given meaningful class work and home work that is properly graded, evaluated, and the student is provided nurturing feedback. This is something that is not happening at Pakistan’s best public and private schools and it is probably not happening in Pakistan’s premier private IT University where I am sitting right now.

The type of load that our faculty has, it is not possible for them to provide feedback to each student in the class. So, one of the things that I want to push for is e-evaluation and e-feedback. In a year or so, we are going to create a Facebook-type application where students create solutions to different problems, there’s a pyramid of experts who check these solutions and, like Wikipedia, (what is incorrect) is thrown out. The question I have not answered yet is: who is going to pay for it?

STEP: The Fund perhaps?

QS: No, no. The scale is so big that the Fund cannot do it alone. It is, literally, a multi-billion dollar investment. But, I’m going to get it done either in this position or as a member of Pakistan’s ICT eco system.

STEP: Any other areas?

QS: We are finding some very interesting traction in health care. So, for example, working with Dr Faisal Sultan of Shaukat Khanam Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Center, we came up with a very interesting idea where we can create something between a lady health worker and the district hospital. We are thinking of an IT system which has a lady health worker at one end and a physician or a trained biochemistry graduate, who has an expert system at his disposal, at the other end.

The other things that we’re very interested in are inexpensive solutions for medical imaging. If you look at medical imaging, there is an analog front end which does analog to digital conversion. This (frontend) is very expensive and we cannot develop it in Pakistan yet. So, we buy these components. But, once the information is digitized, it’s all yours to process using novel algorithms and software and send it back to user interfaces. So, at least we can do the processing and algorithmic part ourselves. We want to move in that direction.

And finally, network security is also very important for us.

STEP: Would there be a time when you would want a national level debate on what are our IT priorities?

QS: Sure! But, I don’t think this is the right time.

STEP: Because the Fund is at a very nascent stage?

QS: Nascent and because, at this point, we have Rs 1.8 billion worth of proposals in the pipeline. We will still have money left if we blindly funded all of them.

STEP: How much of the choice of these areas is your personal influence and how much of it is driven by input from others?

QS: I really wanted it to be a national-level decision. But, I have also realized that you cannot expect everything to be a national-level decision because then it takes forever to decide and no progress is made. So, I am going to push these three or four areas that I just mentioned. For these areas, very significant Request for Proposals (RFPs) will be developed, they will be advertised, proposals will be solicited, evaluation criteria will be published, and it will be a very transparent process. The only thing that will not be transparent will be selection of these areas. But, once these R&D themes get established, then we are going to select more (thematic areas).  By then, stakeholders will start to realize that the National ICT R&D Fund is creating a significant positive impact .and they will seriously start to submit ideas.

STEP: As a researcher, I have a choice to write a proposal for HEC or for you. How do you see the scope of research that you fund being different from what HEC funds?

QS: I think that the key difference between us and the HEC is that the HEC has a huge mandate. They fund from philosophy to horticulture to IT to nanotechnology. Their mandate for supporting R&D is very broad. It is not fair to expect that HEC will look at any one of these segments in depth and try to create a detailed ecosystem that we try to create. Whereas since we are focused only on ICT we are able to look at it in-depth. There’s a negative side as well to this focused approach. It is very difficult for us to fund multi-disciplinary proposals. We are trying to develop a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the HEC where for example if there is a proposal in biotechnology then biotechnology part is funded by HEC, and we fund the ICT part. We are moving towards that but it is taking us time.

STEP: That brings me to another point that I wanted to ask you. Information Technology (IT) can be defined in a very broad way because it is serves a lot of different industries. What is your definition of IT?

QS: Actually, that’s a very tough challenge for all of us. And, finally, I have come up with a very silly example, which is this: if somebody writes the best paper in philosophy using Microsoft Word, should we fund it? Or, if somebody is designing the most eco-friendly building using AutoCAD, should we fund it? No, we can’t. But, if you want to improve AutoCAD to develop a building, then we can fund it. We can also fund chip design, because chip design is a very significant part of ICT.

On the Proposal Evaluation Process

STEP: Changing directions a bit, can you walk us through the grant approval process?

QS: In the formal process, we first do an internal evaluation. We have employees who are educated in science and technology but we cannot be expected to employ experts of every field in our organization. In my mind an important role of internal evaluation is to make sure that the proposal is at a level where by sending it to the external evaluator, we do not waste external evaluator’s time. In my mind, that’s the idea of internal evaluation.

(Once a proposal is approved by the internal evaluators) then, we send it to external evaluators. The pool of external evaluators, which is approved by the board, has experts from within Pakistan as well as foreign experts.

STEP: Does the pool of evaluators include Pakistani diaspora?

QS: Actually, we are very interested in getting the diaspora involved because the benefits are mutual. They send their ideas as external evaluators and they also get to realize depth, breadth and quality of ecosystem that is being created in Pakistan. When they read the proposal they realize the quality of work being done in Pakistan. So we are using them as well.

STEP: What about the standard (of proposals that are funded)?

QS: I’m very happy that you asked this question. We need your help in that because the number one challenge for us right now is to figure out what is the standard at which you accept a proposal for funding — at semantic level, not at syntactic level. At syntax level our approval process looks beautiful, but we still haven’t answered some fundamental questions: what is the standard at which we say that the proposal is acceptable? Is the high jump bar set at 2 feet, 5, feet, 7 feet, or 9 feet? So, where to set the bar? Who sets this bar? What is the process for setting this bar? Once these standards are set, what is the process for disseminating this information to stakeholders? And, finally, how do we get their feedback?

For sure, our standards at this point cannot be the standards of US, EU, or Japan. And, I’m pretty sure that our standards today are better than standards in Nigeria and Ghana. But where are they? And, where should they be?

STEP: But, in peer review process, isn’t the bar set by the peers? So, as the quality of the peers improves, the bar continues to go up.

QS: Well, that’s happening but, since we are at a very initial stage of creating an ecosystem, we really need a nurturing mental framework. So, actually, I have started developing a document describing what we want to see in a proposal at a very high level. I am going to distribute it to the stake holders, informally. I am not going to make it a formal process otherwise we’ll never get anywhere. I am going to wait for two weeks. The suggestions that come back will be very welcome. If they don’t come back, I’m going to use the CEO’s stick and I’m going to say, this is it.

First I’m going to do it at a very high level, and iteratively refine its granularity until we have a check-list. Then, I am going to give legal teeth to this checklist by first getting it recommended by our proposal appraisal committee and then getting it approved by the board. However, no checklist of this type can be expected to be static. So, I am going to create a mechanism for improving or modifying this checklist and that mechanism will get approved by the board as well. I am not sure 100% what this mechanism would be, but possibly a proposal evaluator can add another parameter and a certain authority within the organization can look at it and decide whether adding this parameter to the existing checklist makes sense. If the parameter is added to the checklist, it will then be advertised on our website.

In part two, we talk with Dr. Qasim Sheikh about the role of industry-academia partnerships in creating a knowledge-based economy and the future of the National ICT R&D Fund.