National center for big data, cloud computing inaugurated at LUMS

LAHORE: The inauguration of the National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing took place at LUMS.

The ceremony was attended by noted personalities from the educational and development sectors of Pakistan. The Rs1.5 billion Center will be housed at LUMS and will comprise of 12 ‘Affiliated’ Labs at 11 Universities around the country including LUMS, EME College, PNEC, UETL, UETP, ITU, SZABIST, FAST-NU, CECOS, Ziauddin University and UAF and employ 50 of the country’s leading Analytics and Cloud researchers.

The guests at the ceremony were welcomed by Dr. Naveed Arshad, Interim Director, NCBC and Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, LUMS. He said that Pakistan has a huge population under 30 years of age and that provides an excellent pool of Human Resource that can be tapped into to make Pakistan leapfrog to prosperity. He said that data is gold in this age and facilities such as this lab will provide the means to process and analyse the data to solve world problems. 

He shared that the Center came about after the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan launched a competition and called out to all the research groups working in Pakistani Universities in the field of Big Data and Computing. They were invited through EOI and had to go through a rigorous process of selection including three rounds of competition. “The NCBC will be mainly focused on R&D and human resource development in the specialised field of Big Data and Cloud Computing. The role of Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing is growing in many businesses and applications become extremely critical to economic growth and national competitiveness. The idea is to provide a platform for promoting a culture of Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing industry and related businesses,” explained Dr. Arshad.

Prof. Dr. S. Sohail H. Naqvi, Vice Chancellor, LUMS; Shahid Hussain, Member of the Board of Trustees of LUMS; Dr. Athar Osama, Member Science and Technology Planning Commission; Dr. Arshad Ali, Executive Director, HEC and Federal Minister Mr. Ahsan Iqbal also addressed the gathering.***