BHURBAN, June 22: Pakistan can achieve socio-economic development by adopting and utilizing modern science and technology, the director of National Centre for Physics (NCP), Quaid-i-Azam University, Prof Riazuddin, said.

He was speaking as chief guest at the concluding session of the second International Bhurban Conference on Applied Science and Technology (IBCAST) at a local hotel.

The six-day conference, organized by the NCP, was attended by 410 participants with 337 from research and development and scientific organizations and 67 from universities. A total of 113 papers were presented at the conference.

As many as 14 speakers from Mexico, Canada, Belgium, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan read their papers at the conference. The conference featured four distinct scientific activities on advanced material, wireless communication and radars, control and simulation and computational fluid dynamics. Prof Riazuddin said Pakistan should thoroughly prepare itself by investing in frontier science before any new revolution in science and technology knocked at its door.

He said Pakistan missed the transistor revolution and was now trying to enter information technology (IT) when the IT bubble had already burst. He cautioned that the country would remain ignorant about the rapid progress and potentialities in science if it did not invest in the field.

He was appreciative of the government’s realization and said science and technology could pull the country out of the vicious circle of poverty and lack of resources.

The scientific secretary, Dr Hafeez Hoorani, spoke at length on the various activities held in the conference. For each activity, he said, there was a programmed coordinator who was responsible for the technical and scientific contents of each session. He said the call for the papers was sent out in January 2003. The deadline for the abstract was April 15 and for the full paper was June 1. He revealed that for next year’s conference, the call for paper would be sent out by August 2003.

Dr Hoorani said the proceedings of the conference would be published by mid-September this year. “All our proceedings have ISBN, which implies that there are catalogues in all the libraries in the world,” he added.

He said as all the papers were properly referred by the evaluation committees, so a paper published in this way was like any other paper published in an international journal. He hoped that the tradition of IBCAST would continue in the future.

Dr John Stiekema from South Africa, in his brief speech, said there was something in terms of learning and knowledge for every participant.

“I was pleasantly impressed by the level of talks in the conference,” he added.

Talking to this reporter, he said the progress and potential of Pakistan was not visible to the world. He said Pakistan could sustain its development in science and technology by increased investment on education.

Dr Ruben Avila from Mexico, who spoke on computational fluid dynamics, said Pakistan had great power in this particular discipline as judged from the speakers who were mostly young persons.—Junaid Bahadur