LAHORE: Speakers at an International Conference on Innovative Computing organized by the University Management and Technology said on Monday the rapidly changing field of computing was posing challenges for universities around the world.

They said that degrees in computing should be connected globally paving the way for practicality and professionalism which was the need of hour.

UMT Rector Dr Hasan Sohaib Murad said: “The technology is affecting our lives with the creation of new spaces for apps and cloud computing and grid computing. This is an era of computing and this is the time of people associated with the computing technology.”

He said the individuals attached with computing field should work on synergies between information technology developments and its applications in various fields of life as no field was left unaffected by technology.

“The technology is essential for contemporary lifestyle. It is changing the way we work and it is to make life easier and comfortable. More advancement and more innovations are required to improve the quality of life,” he said

Dr Stefano Ceri, a professor from Italy, shared his views on genomic computing, which he said was a new science that focused on understanding the functioning of the genome as a premise to fundamental discoveries in biology and medicine.

He said the next generation sequencing (NGS) allowed the production of the entire human genome sequence at a cost of about $1,000. “Many algorithms exist for the extraction of genome features or “signals”, including peaks (enriched regions), mutations, or gene expression (intensity of transcription activity).”

Dr Rebecca Fox, another scholar from USA’s George Mason University, gave presentation on International and Inter-Disciplinary Professional Learning for Innovation for the Twenty-First Century.

She said that universities today were more vital than ever and must respond to an increasingly urgent call to prepare world citizens for the upcoming decades of the 21st century.

“Global engagement calls for professionals who are not only capable of working and living in a rapidly changing and globalized world, but who must also possess critical reflective capacity to promote content knowledge application in relevant, innovative, and entrepreneurial ways,” she added.

Dr Marley Lee, a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at ChonBuk National University, Korea, talked on the importance of an Intelligent Health Care Data Management System.

She said that in a healthcare environment, we usually got the patient’s health information in an idle state.

She said the collected data was then managed and analyzed in the healthcare server so that a care giver could study the patient’s physiological state.

The conference revolved around creative areas such as algorithms design, artificial intelligence, wireless sensor networks, mobile network and systems, www applications, software engineering, internet of things, computer vision and pattern recognition, ubiquitous computing and many more.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2016