Pakistan’s Umar Saif of LUMS hits global list of top 35 innovators under 35

If you have even a tiny bit of thought that Pakistan has no association with the word “innovation”, well, think again, because you would be very wrong. This year, Pakistan’s Dr. Umar Saif
has proudly made his way to a place in the global IT sector. MIT Technology Review, which is one of the world’s most reputed and recognised technology publications, has included Dr Saif in their global list of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35 (also
known as TR-35 Award).

Dr. Saif was nominated for the glorious prestige due to his remarkable work in creating BitMate, which he calls the “poor man’s broadband system” and SMSall.pk, which enables cell phone
users to send mass SMSes around the country.

Average bandwidth of a landline connection in Pakistan is about 32kb per second. If the connection doesn’t drop, it means downloading a 5mb file will take more than 20 minutes. While in
the US, an connection has an average bandwidth of 5.3mb per second and can download the same 5mb file in less than a second. Dr. Saif developed BitMate to overcome this connectivity divide.

BitMate allows internet users in an area to pond the bandwidth of their connections to reduce download times, normally by half. The software was released in February, 2011 and has already
been downloaded more than 30,000 times by people in 173 countries.

BitMate and SMSall.pk, were both developed by Dr. Saif and a team of his students at LUMS called Dritte. Dritte is currently a Pakistan-based research group led by Dr. Saif, who came up
with this fascinating idea keeping in mind the connectivity problems people face generally in Pakistan. BitMate has been especially developed to support torrent downloads on dial-up connections.

Dr. Saif is now taking SMSall to the next level working with the team of his students under Dritte initiative. They have moved one step ahead and are working on speech systems that will
allow for mass voice messaging. Saif believes that in a country where many cannot read or write, the speech system is an essential step.

During a press conference at LUMS, Dr. Saif spoke about SMSall.pk, “The one thing that every Pakistani, poor or rich, does have is a mobile phone. It is the easiest way to communicate
and spread a certain message. SMSall can be used on an individual level as well as for marketing or other like purposes.”

Around 2.7 million users have sent more than 4 billion SMSes using SMSall.pk so far and it has now become Pakistan’s largest SMS social network. Many major political parties, NGOs, schools,
and corporations in Pakistan use this platform. Saif has already begun expanding SMSall beyond Pakistan to Nigeria, Iraq, Bangladesh, and the Philippines during past summer.

Thirty-two year old Saif is currently teaching at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) as an associate professor. Dr. Saif now shares this honour with an elite club of innovators
including, Jonathan Ive of Apple, the co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=2044

Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Oct 29 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry