Center of Excellence for Internet Technologies to established in Islamabad
 
A Center of Excellence for Internet Technologies is being established in Islamabad in collaboration with PTCL, NUST and Cisco. To be set up in the 800 acre H-12 campus of NUST, the Center is the brainchild of Mr Walid Irshaid, President and CEO, PTCL. An MoU to this effect was signed yesterday by the three parties, with the Chief Guest being Dr Ata ur Rahman, Chairman HEC.
 
Mr Walid Irshaid, speaking on the occasion, said that Etiselat is keenly aware of its obligations towards the Pakistani technical community, and that by setting up such a Center, PTCL will be able to benefit from world class research that will be of immense value not just to PTCL but also to the wider Etiselat group of companies. In addition, the human resources that will be developed at this Center will be able to export their skills and expertise to the region and beyond. This will spur growth in the Pakistani IT sector, and will contribute towards enhancing the quality and quantity of exportable IT related skills to the global marketplace.
 
Mr Samer Alkharrat, Managing Director for Gulf and Pakistan, Cisco Systems, further elaborated upon the importance of such a Center and said that this initiative is one of a kind in Pakistan. No other global technology company has teamed up with any Pakistani institution to conduct cutting edge research of relevance to industry, he elaborated. The collaboration with PTCL is essential to ensuring that the research carried out at the Center is relevant to industry, and the Center will benefit enormously from the hands on expertise that exists within PTCL to manage and optimize large scale IP networks. 

The Center, staffed by researchers from NUST, will work closely with Cisco and PTCL to define areas of research that would have applicability to developing countries in particular. The actual research itself will be carried out at Pakistani universities, with engineers from Cisco in the US providing the overall thematic direction of the research. One such research project is already underway, with funding provided by the National ICT R&D Fund and research scientists from Cisco teaming up professors at a Pakistani University to develop open source tools for performance monitoring of network traffic. An application for a US patent is being filed as a result of the work carried out during the course of that research.
 
"NUST has a well established tradition of joint research projects with some of the world's best known universities, but collaborating on research that is cutting edge in terms of its industrial relevance will open up a new chapter in our research", said Lt Gen Mohammad Asghar, Rector NUST during his remarks.
 
In addition to research, the Center will also provide high end professional training courses to PTCL and other telecom companies. With the convergence of voice, data and video, the complexity involved in managing such networks increases exponentially and hence these highly technical courses and certifications will be of immediate value to Pakistani engineers. Funding for the research conducted at the Center will be provided by the National ICT R&D Fund. Dr Qasim Sheikh, CEO of the Fund added that this particular area of ICT is of critical importance to Pakistan and the Fund is extremely pleased to see PTCL and Cisco join hands with NUST to create a research group in this area.