ISLAMABAD, Sept 17: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) Executive Director Dr Sohail Naqvi on Saturday stressed upon the academia to utilize modern emerging technologies for socio- economic uplift of the country. He said this while inaugurating the two-day international conference on emerging technologies organized by the Centre for Advance Studies in Engineering (CASE) in collaboration with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Dr Naqvi said with the emergence of new technologies at a faster pace, the technology gap between the rich and poor nations was widening at an alarming rate. A major reason for the gap, he said, was lack of skilled engineers and technologists capable of integrating new technologies into existing systems and networks.

“Pakistan can earn due share from IT revolution if it had enough trained manpower in cutting edge technologies,” he added.

He termed the advancement in telecommunications infrastructure as the basic tool for any country to meet up with the challenges of the information age.

“The government was paying utmost importance to deployment of the state-of-the-art telecom infrastructure in the country,” he added.

He said the government was giving top priority to higher education, specially in science and technology, to increase human resource availability.

“Expatriate scholars, researchers, educationists and scientists are being appointed in Pakistani universities to raise standard of education and research in the country,” adding that for skilled professionals in the above disciplines scholarships were offered for studying abroad.

Speaking on the occasion, Executive Vice-President IT, PTCL, Fuad Imran Khan said due to the deregulation policy, the telecom sector had witnessed an unprecedented growth. He said teledensity, which was 5.29 per cent in the country last year, had now reached up to 11.3 per cent.

During the conference, globally renowned academic and professionals would present their latest research on cutting edge technologies in all disciplines of science and technology.