October 28, 2007	Sunday	Shawwal 15, 1428

ISLAMABAD, Oct 27: Pakistan may be far behind India in information technology, but there is no dearth of talent as was witnessed at the IT competition held at the Baharia University on Saturday.

Bits, Bytes and Colours, an all Pakistan IT gala challenged Computer Sciences students to conceive, design, fabricate, and test their hardware and software innovations.

As many as two dozen colleges from around Pakistan participated in the two-day competition exhibiting their software programmes and hardware designs.

It took Irfan Waheed, final year student of software engineering of Baharia University several months to build his spy plane fitted with digital camera. “I bought everything out of my own pocket. That’s one of the reasons why it took me so long to build my plane. But now it can be used for defence purposes. I can control the plane up to a distance of one kilometre,” Irfan said as he punched keys in his laptop that gave a view from the cockpit of his model.

“I can also feed in a map and the plane will automatically make left and right turns to follow a defined path,” he said proudly.

Raheela Shehzadi and Noshaba Tariq, both fourth year Computer Science students stood behind their hardware design Security Camera system for missile navigation.

“We were given an assignment by the National Development Complex (NDC) to build driving circuitry that would rotate the camera 360 degrees and tilt it 120 degrees,” said Raheela as she demonstrated automatic and manual movements.