The National ICT R&D Fund has the vision “to transform Pakistan’s economy into a knowledge based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable and effective ICT initiatives through synergic development of industrial and academic resources,†said the CEO of the Fund Dr. Qasim Sheikh in an interview with me on ITLoW.
Dr. Qasim Sheikh attained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
He worked for over 9 years with Cray Research as Senior Applications Analyst developing optimized solvers for large dense and sparse linear systems of equations and integrated these solvers in software for simulation of physical phenomena like oil reservoir simulation, semiconductor device simulation etc.
Dr. Qasim Sheikh then spent two years as a Director at CresSoft which was in its hey day at that time and subsequently joined FAST as a Professor for about 6 years.
He has been CEO of the National R&D Fund for the past two years and has spent a lot of his time explaining to University professors and industry professionals to get involved in high value and innovative Research and Development.
However, there are still a lot of questions regarding the fund and the kind of projects they are willing to invest in, what are the expectations from the proposals they receive, what are the bottlenecks? So I decided that since Dr. Qasim Sheikh was in karachi, we would call him into the Studio and have a chat with him, to try and get him to demystify the Fund.
This interview with Dr. Qasim Sheikh is an hour long so we have decided to break it up into 2 segments. In this episode Dr Qasim talks about how the Fund was set up, the process, the kind of activities and projects it has funded, what kind of proposals they have received, some of the problems that have kept these proposals from being looked at seriously, etc etc.
Do watch the episode. It clears up a lot of misconceptions. If you have questions for Dr. Qasim, you can post them here or on the CIO Webstudio. Dr. Qasim has promised to answer any questions that we have for him. That is what we need from everyone who is part of the public sector. Thank you Dr. Qasim.