(Education): IT can play important role in country’s development

Karachi:The information technology is one of the most important components of international economies and the growth in the IT sector is essential to achieve the goals of sustainable development. IT also has an important role in the social development of any country.

 

Besides providing quality teaching and research activities, the University of Karachi is striving for producing the best hands-on training workshops, seminars, and conferences to the faculty and students.

 

We aimed to develop the minds of students as well as help them in learning new tools and technology while they are studying on the campus. These views were expressed by the KU Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Khalid Mahmood Iraqi on Monday.

 

He was the chief guest at the concluding session of the four-day long hands-on workshop on ‘Environment Modeling Based Requirements Engineering’. The event was organized by the COMSTECH Ministerial Standing Committee for Scientific and Technological Cooperation, in collaboration with IEEE Educational Activities Karachi Section, and held at the Latif Ebrahim Jamal Computer Laboratory, KU. More than 80 participants took part in the workshop of which 25 students were present in the computer lab while 60 students attended the workshop online.

 

The KU VC Professor Dr Khalid Iraqi said that we have such platforms where students are getting full opportunities to adapt to modern technology under the supervision of experts. He shared that the University of Karachi often conducted training sessions, workshops, and other such activities so that students could not face any difficulty in their practical life and sometimes such activities are arranged with the collaboration of other universities or institutions.

 

He observed that youth is our greatest asset and said that if they are provided with quality education and better training along with modern requirements, then they could play a key role in the development of Pakistan.

 

Meanwhile, one of the master trainers of the event, Professor Zhi Jin, through a video link shared that the cyber world and the physical world are being connected closer through a network of interrelated elements, such as sensors and actuators, robots, and other computing devices.

 

Professor Zhi Jin, who is a software engineering at Peking University, China, said that there are inspiring increasing numbers of beneficial applications in dependable sectors such as aviation, transportation, aerospace, healthcare.

 

According to her, in requirements engineer’s viewpoint, the environment, the specification and the requirements are no longer independent, and they become the integral concerns of a system. She said that such systems face an open and continuously changing environment which poses challenges for requirement engineering.

 

“One of the challenges is that the trust assumptions about the environment are no longer fixed after deriving the specification and deployment. The environment must be treated as the first-class runtime concern.”

 

On this occasion, the Coordinator General COMSTECH Professor Dr Muhammad Iqbal Choudhry said that we should continue to work in promoting soft techniques in Pakistan. We have a lot of colleagues and we all understand that every institution including our University of Karachi all have limited human resources, for logical reasons we all have to work together, with joint collaboration, we could achieve a lot of goals.

 

He observed that countries like Pakistan do not invest large on the infrastructure. He said that young people are the real assets of our country and Pakistan is so fortunate that we have more young blood and young minds.

 

Furthermore, Professor Dr Bhawany Shankar Choudhry, Chair IEEE Karachi section, said that the workshop has covered some innovative themes including requirements engineering, problem frame approach, environment modelling based approach.

 

Dr Sadiq Ali Khan, Chair IEEE Educational Activities Karachi Section, and Coordinator of the workshop briefed the audience about four days of extensive workshop, its different aspects in detail.

 

He informed the audience that Prof Zhi Jin and Professor Xiohong Chen from Peking University, China, were resource persons and shared their experiences with the participants of the hands-on workshop.

 

He said such activities boost the knowledge and skills of our young students. He further said that as learning outcomes we need to model the spaces and reactive rules also we need to focus on some techniques for time-dependent behavior and time-space consistency.