Covid-19 has increased importance of technology, says Dr Iraqi

The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the importance of technology, said Prof Dr Khalid Mahmood Iraqi, adding that any society not using technology is unable to progress.

Addressing a workshop titled ‘Contextual Probability: Concepts, Implementations and Applications’, the acting vice chancellor of the University of Karachi said we are living in a century where technology is superior to everything else.

The workshop was organised by Comstech (the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation) and the Karachi Section of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Around 80 people participated in the workshop online and 30 others attended it in person.

Dr Iraqi said the coronavirus emergency has directed our attention towards the option of online education at universities, but we have to sort out the problems in this relatively new learning system.

He said the use of technology is compulsory for the advancement of society, adding that no society can make progress without giving preference to science.

He also said we live in a society where people earlier believed the Covid-19 pandemic to be fictitious, but they later accepted this reality only after their near and dear ones got infected.

He stressed that science and technology should be given preference so that the youth of Pakistan can excel in their fields and enable the country to join the league of developed nations. He said anyone choosing to gain knowledge of science and focus on skill development is bound to progress.

Dr Iraqi said that even qualified plumbers and electricians are in an insufficient number in the country, adding that the promotion of skill development will go a long way in ending the curse of joblessness.

Machine learning

Professor of Computer Science at Ulster University in the United Kingdom, Hui Wang, who participated in the workshop online, emphasised the application of machine learning related to different types of data sets. He explained how contextual probability can be used for decision-making and for general problem-solving.

Prof Wang elaborated how neighbourhood counting has been applied to multivariate data, sequence, tree and graph, resulting in elegant similarity measures. He mentioned that contextual probability is a method for non-parametric probability estimation without using any model assumption.

He said if we can estimate the probability for any data instance, we can classify the instance in a Bayes Optimal way. “Contextual probability is also a method for reasoning with uncertainty, so it can be used for decision-making and potentially general problem-solving.”

According to him, neighbourhood counting is a methodology for measuring data similarity, which applies to any type of data as long as the neighbourhood can be defined.

He said that for a given set of data instances, neighbourhood counting similarity is the number of all neighbourhoods that cover all data instances in the given set.

IEEE Karachi Section chair and Higher Education Commission member Dr Bhawani Shankar said the training staff of the workshop used the best of their expertise to organise the learning activity during the health emergency.

Earlier, KU Department of Computer Science Chairman Dr Sadiq Ali Khan had thanked Dr Iraqi for supporting such learning activities at the university for the promotion of a proper culture of research and academic activities on campus.

Dr Khan said that academic activities of IEEE and Comstech should be followed by others in order to enhance the learning abilities of their students.