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IBA aims to establish bridge between academia and professional world

By our correspondents
December 15, 2015

Karachi

The Institute of Business Administration (IBA) held a two-day international conference on information and communication technologies over the weekend to promote and enhance organisational research activities in the disciplines of computer sciences and information systems, said Prof Dr Shakeel Ahmed Khoja while talking to The News on Sunday.

The chairman of the department of computer sciences at IBA said the two-day conference was held on Saturday and Sunday by the students of computer science and information systems department with the help of professionals and experts in the country and abroad.

On the occasion, he said, the IBA also signed an MoU with the University Institute of Lisbon, one the leading centres for higher education in Portugal.

Dr Khoja said the aim of the conference was to provide a quality platform for acquiring, sharing and disseminating results of completed and ongoing indigenous research activities. "This conference will help in cultivating a strong tradition of applying state of the art research in local contexts and solving local problems that can serve as global examples," he said.

According to the conference’s managing committee, 99 research papers written by around 200 authors —  affiliated with not only the universities from Pakistan but also from India, Brazil, Bahrain, China, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Sweden, UK and USA — had shown their interest for participating in the event.

However, after careful scrutiny of the merits of submissions by international and local panels of reviewers, 49 papers are accepted for publications into the conference and will now be included into the IEEE index.

A numbers of keynote speakers from USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Portugal, and leading IT universities of Pakistan such as IBA, LUMS, NUST, FAST and Habib University also presented their research work.

The conference was technically sponsored by the Higher Education Commissioner and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc USA.

There are more than 20 students for the PhD programme, 80 students are doing masters while about 400 are enrolled in graduate studies. “For them we have 20 teachers in the computer sciences faculty,” said Dr Khoja. “This conference will also benefit students IBA and also other institutes who have registered themselves for the event, besides exposing them to a horde of knowledge from foreign experts who have come here to share their experiences with the local IT and computer students.”

Explaining further, Dr Khoja said another major aspect of this conference was that it provided a chance of real time interaction between researchers and students. “These young minds have a good chance to learn from visiting researchers about latest technologies and methodologies being used in the IT industry, and it will also help them choose their specialities.”

According to him, over the weekend the students have listened to various lectures while Pakistani researchers and experts have also showcased their projects.

“The visiting researchers stressed for more focus on long term strategies for helping students excel in their career,” said Dr Khoja.

Answering a question, he said after 9/11 the Pakistani IT market earned at least three times the declared amount earned by the industry in the US, since the IT was one of the few industries which did not face a blowback from the tragic incident. “Only those software houses and businesses shut down which did not have any pre-establish links with the market due to their poor policies,” he added.