Recompute Podcast

Mohammad Nasrullah, “Nash” for people who know him, is a technologist who has started multiple tech companies, and is currently the CEO of “Integry”, another company he founded. Earlier, he co-founded Pring, a “social network designed to be accessible to every Pakistani with a phone via offline SMS”.

Dr. Ali Khayam, a stellar teacher and world-class scholar, with high impact factor publications, grants, awards, and recognition any academician in the world could dream of, still left academia stating that his work wasn’t creating impact in a university.

This is one of the most special ReCompute episodes as today we have as our guests, students – the ultimate creation of this whole enterprise that we call universities. We are lucky to have a diverse panel, in the shape of Aiman who has already graduated from Habib University; Musawar, who is the final year student at Namal University, Mianwali, and Farae who is now in the second year of his undergrad at Giki.

Both our guests in this podcast are Computer Science (CS) university teachers, and both have their own, unique, unconventional approach to teaching introductory programming courses. We ask them why they felt universities in Pakistan are not producing the quality of graduates they could, and why conventional teaching approach in most Pakistani Universities was probably not fulfilling its purpose.

Zulfiqar Gilani is a psychologist by training, and has worked in US and Canada as a clinical psychologist for many years. He came back to Pakistan intending to retire, but in 2001 General Musharraf formulated a task force which was to work at devising a vision for improving the higher education in Pakistan.

Noman came across Khalid Latif as his senior in his university at Bahawalpur where Khalid had kickstarted a final exam boycott movement. This was intriguing, as historically, most of the student-led strikes were for non-academic issues at that time.

Dr. Sabieh Anwar hardly needs any introduction in Pakistani academia, but Recompute.pk has taken a different perspective in this podcast. We went through a reflective cross section of his life, first when he was a student, then his phase as a young scholar or a faculty member joining a university in Pakistan, and finally his experience as a dean of an important STEM school at LUMS.

Why Bilal? Bilal Zafar is co-founder of 10XEngineers, a design services organization in the domain of computer engineering. Before that he was VP Engineering at Lampró Méllon, another design services company.

Aamir Shahzad has studied at NUST and LUMS in Pakistan. But he’s also experienced being a student and researcher in France, Sweden, China, Singapore and Russia. As a teacher, he has experienced working at 5 Pakistani universities, and has been involved in curriculum development at departmental level as well.