Wednesday, January 25, 2012

The Pakistani innovator

The Pakistani innovator



Umar Saif is a Pakistani computer scientist and entrepreneur, who is known for his work on using ICT solutions for developing-world problems.


Saif holds a BSc. from the Lahore University of Management Sciences and Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Cambridge, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar at Trinity College. Saif is a tenured associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan and established one of the first startup incubators in Pakistan, called the Saif Center of Innovation (SCI). Saif’s work on grassroots technologies received the MIT Technovator Award in 2008 and he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010.

In August 2011, the MIT Technology Review (Judges who are leading experts in their fields from universities such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard) named Saif among its list of the 35 “World’s Top Young Innovators for the year 2011″. The list recognises the works of the world’s top young innovators that are radically transforming technology; it was also the first time in the past decade that a Pakistani had been featured. By featuring in the list, Saif now joins an elite group of researchers and technologists including the likes of Google’s Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

Dr. Saif’s named was included in the list for his and his students contribution in developing BitMate (a BitTorrent client designed for the low-bandwidth clients in the developing-world). BitMate has been downloaded more than 20,000 times by users from 173 countries.BitMate doubles the performance of low-bandwidth clients while drastically improving their fairness (upload capacity) by enabling low-bandwidth peers to help each other download faster.

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