PITB chief urges ICTD researchers to collaborate

LAHORE: Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) Chairman and Information Technology University (ITU) Vice Chancellor Dr Umar Saif said that international researchers should come forward to collaborate for finding solutions to problems of the developing world.He said this while addressing audience during the 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) Pakistan, 2017.

Dr Saif said that Pakistan had become the fifth largest populated country with 37 million social media users, including 32 million Facebook and Twitter users. He said that these numbers were higher than the population of Australia and New Zealand, adding that this trend confirmed the acceptability and adaptability of Pakistanis.

He said that the PITB had very effectively gathered and digitised the data of 50,000 schools and five million farmers in Punjab, which was accessible to the ICTD community for collaborating in order to find solutions to the problems being faced in the agriculture sector. This data could also be used for poverty alleviation and rural development, he added.

Dr Saif informed: “The ITU, established five years back, has 900 students with 90 faculty members and convocation of its first batch of graduates was scheduled to be held on December 17, 2017.”

Dr Sania Nishtar, a keynote speaker of the conference, said that serialisation of medicine with QR code could help in combating fake drugs, which would be a great service to humanity.The four-day conference concluded here on Sunday.