Education must for sustainable development: Chairman HEC
Bushra Rafique

ISLAMABAD—Chairman Higher Education Commission (HEC) Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman has termed the National Engineering and Scientific Commission (NESCOM) ‘an island of outstanding excellence’ in the field of research and its applications.
He was inaugurating the 1st All Pakistan NESCOM Competition on Embedded Systems at NESCOM Club here on Tuesday.
The Chairman lauded the achievements of Dr. Samar Mubarakmand, Chairman NESCOM and appreciated his interest in launching the first ever competition on Embedded Systems and providing a forum to the young creative minds in the area of research and development. ‘Universities should be differentiated by their ability to create knowledge,’ he said.
He told the gathering that in the present fast changing world, knowledge had long become the key driver for success and the single powerhouse for development had now become the youth of a country.
He stressed the need to empower the Pakistan youth with outstanding education and facilities for research. With 54 % of youth in the country, it was now imperative to educate and tap into this massive pool of creativity and meet success head-on.
He said that through its reforms, the Higher Education Commission was endeavouring to raise access to higher education for students. At present a mere 3.5 % of youth between the ages of 17-23 years went to university compared to 68% in South Korea.
HEC, he said was working towards providing the youth with a world class educations and opportunities to work for national cause rather than seek greener pastures abroad.
The last four years had already begun to bring about a change in seats of learning and since research publication in Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) show an increase of 35%, reforms put into motion by HEC are having the desired effect, he added. Chairman HEC inaugurated the Competition and visited the stalls set up by the contestants. The topics for the competition include Embedded Systems, Digital Consumer Electronic, Wireless Communication, Power Management and Automotive Electronics.
Students from all over the country are participating in this highly competitive contest which will help create awareness among the youth and the public about the critical value of embedded systems, which is an important discipline of computer science with applications in our daily lives. They are used in automobiles, planes, trains, machine tools, cameras, consumer appliances, cell phones, robots and even toys.
An embedded system is a special purpose system in which the computer is completely encapsulated by the device it controls. Unlike a general purpose computer, such as a personal computer, an embedded system performs one or a few pre-defined tasks, usually with very specific requirements.
Since the system is dedicated to specific tasks, design engineers can optimize it reducing the size and cost of the product. Results of the contest will be announced today (Wednesday).