[StarTech] TechSpotLight: The USB story

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=92258

Many of us have recently seen the Intel’s TV advertisement which shows Ajay Bhatt, the co-inventor of the USB, aptly termed as our rockstars aren’t like your rockstars walking and moving like a celebrity would. Interesting advertisement, to say the least. To those of you are thinking that this article is about Intel or the advertisement industry in general, behold! It’s about neither and is about the Universal Serial Bus or USB in short.

For most of us using personal computers in our day-to-day lives, whether it be for office or college work or simply checking emails and facebooking, the USB port is a common device about which we barely ever think about.

Initially designed to replace the many varieties of serial and parallel ports that were jumbling up our PCs with every new gadget, and thus making the production of standard devices increasingly difficult, it has today become the quintessential bridge to connect computer peripherals like mice, keyboards, PDAs, gamepads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, printers, personal media players, flash drives, and external hard drives.

Although it was designed to be used for personal computers, USB has today become commonplace on other devices such as PDAs and video game consoles, and as a power cord between a device and an AC adapter plugged into a wall plug for charging. According to a PC World report published in 2008, there are about 2 billion USB devices sold every year with total about 6 billion sold to date!

The history of the USB dates back to 1994 when the specifications for the first generation of USB or USB 1.0 were introduced. The intention was to replace the multitude of connectors at the back of PCs, as well as to simplify software configuration of communication devices. The original USB 1.0 specification had a data transfer rate of 12 Mbit/s.

The creation of USB was a result of research conducted by a core group of companies that consisted of Intel, Compaq, Microsoft, Digital, IBM, and Northern Telecom. Intel produced the UHCI (Universal Host Controller Interface) host controller and open software stack; Microsoft produced a USB software stack for Windows and co-authored the OHCI host controller specification with National Semiconductor and Compaq; Philips produced early USB-Audio; and TI produced the most widely used hub chips.

Six years later, the USB 2.0 specification was released in April 2000 and was standardized at the end of 2001. Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent following its merger with Alcatel in 2006), Microsoft, NEC, and Philips jointly led the initiative to develop a higher data transfer rate, 480 Mbit/s, than the 1.0 specification of 12 Mbit/s.

The latest in line, the third generation of USB, or USB 3.0 specification was released on November 17, 2008 by the USB 3.0 Promoter Group. It has a transfer rate of up to 10 times faster than the USB 2.0 version and has been dubbed the SuperSpeed USB.

The benefit of USB is equipment conforming with any version of the standard will also work with devices designed to any previous specification (a property known as backward compatibility).

Every USB system has an asymmetric design, consisting of a host, a multitude of downstream USB ports, and multiple peripheral devices connected in a tiered-star topology. A USB host may have multiple host controllers and each host controller may provide one or more USB ports. Up to 127 devices, including the hub devices may be connected to a single host controller.

USB devices are linked in series through hubs and there always exists one hub known as the root hub, which is built into the host controller. This sharing hubs, as they are popularly know to be, allow multiple computers to access the same peripheral device(s), also exist and work by switching access between PCs, either automatically or manually. They are popular in small-office environments.

A physical USB device may consist of several logical sub-devices that are referred to as device functions. A single device may provide several functions, for example, a webcam (video device function) with a built-in microphone (audio device function).

When a USB device is first connected to a USB host, the USB device enumeration process is started. The enumeration starts by sending a reset signal to the USB device. The speed of the USB device is determined during the reset signaling. After reset, the USB device’s information is read by the host, then the device is assigned a unique 7-bit address. If the device is supported by the host, the device drivers needed for communicating with the device are loaded and the device is set to a configured state. If the USB host is restarted, the enumeration process is repeated for all connected devices.

The host controller directs traffic flow to devices, so no USB device can transfer any data on the bus without an explicit request from the host controller. In USB 2.0, host controller polls the bus for traffic, usually in a round-robin fashion. In SuperSpeed USB, connected devices can request service from host.

Technical jargon aside, the Universal Serial Bus or USB has come as a blessing for PC users all over the world and in the coming days, it is all set to become even more faster and convenient for the users.

Information Source: The Internet.

[StarTech] TechSpotlight: eGeneration (Setting new dimension to outsourcing)

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=87289

Software developers busy working at eGeneration’s office. A screenshot of a CRM software developed by the company.

For a country to move forward in this fast changing world there should be a proper balance between its imports and exports. While essential products like crude oil and fruits have to be imported at a high price, this also means that export oriented businesses like the garments sector and the shrimp and tea industry have to earn the foreign currency to compensate that.

Although still a new and growing sector, the IT industry is now chipping in as well, with different locally made high quality software being exported to different countries at very competitive prices.

eGeneration Ltd is one such company, outsourcing its various software products to different countries in the world including USA, Canada, Denmark, Russia and Japan.

Founded in 2005, the company has seen a steady growth rate of above 50 percent in the last three years despite the global economic meltdown since the middle of last year. Specialising in customer management and content management, the company also serves the local market with its CRM (Customer Relations Management) and other software.

The key feature of eGeneration, which gives it an upper edge to many of its counterparts, is its four 4E approach, which includes Efficient, Excellence, Effective and Economic.

The company provides efficient access to information and technologies and by optimising value-based solution to its consumer organisations, it helps achieve and sustain measurable results in a short time frame that is in demand.

The company tries to work in conjunction with its clients to meet the challenges of today’s global market by providing them with the tools that are needed to compete more efficiently by aligning business strategy with technology driven business transformation initiatives.

eGeneration strives to provide excellent infrastructure and technology expertise and with a team of consultants who focus on delivery of excellence to the projects with state-of-the-art hardware and networking infrastructure.

The company provides effective business flow acceleration and implementation services with a complete range of delivered services that leverage business flows built on best practices, and rapid implementation methodologies. These solutions are designed to address the unique complexities of its consumers and automate critical business processes.

The organisation provides services to improve the operating efficiency by re-engineering the business processes and streamlining the workflows. It analyses Value Chain process flow to identify process improvement opportunities, identify changes required, eliminate redundancies and incorporate new process definitions.

The fourth ‘E’ of the company describes its fourth objective, to establish an economic project delivery approach — reduced cost with uncompromising quality. Through its application software, eGeneration enables its customers to reduce their IT costs and mitigate risks while receiving an unparalleled quality of service.

eGeneration is planning to set up its first foreign office in Copenhagen, Denmark soon, says its CEO Shameem Ahsan, an MIS graduate from the University of Central Oklahoma. “The European market, specially the Scandinavian market, is a big one and we are hoping to be able to open our first office in Europe in Copenhagen sometime in 2011. In addition to that, we already have partnerships with companies to promote our sales in UK, USA and Denmark.”

Keld A Christensen, director, Nordsource Global, Denmark, is one of the satisfied customers of the company and has been quoted as saying “eGeneration has constantly demonstrated high levels of business and technical knowledge, creativity and delivery excellence. We remain highly satisfied.”

Working with a core group of 25 employees, the company has already undertaken a number of foreign and local projects. Some of the already-accomplished projects were of significant monetary value, being in the range of $50,000 to $100,000. Currently, eGeneration is working on eight projects, six of which are foreign.

“People, process and technologies are the three areas that we are good at which seem to give us an edge over our competitors. For this, we were awarded the DCCI Business Award for ‘Best Young Entrepreneur’ in 2006, the first IT company to achieve such a feat,” says Ahsan.

The company has recently finished making a FRS (Fertilizer Recommendation Software) for Katalyst and Soil Research Development Agency. Due to start soon as a pilot project in Bangladesh, it will gradually encompass the whole country. The software will try to help decide the optimum amount of fertilizer to be used for a given crop, land size, soil type and weather through telecentres, thus minimizing the wastage of fertilizers, which currently poses a significant problem in our country.

A total of 25 foreign companies have bought software from eGeneration including ELBO Group, a leading publication group in Denmark (Magazine Management System) and Knowing Point, a HR Consultancy company in USA (Partner Relation Management System). For more information about the company and its different projects visit its website at: http://egeneration.com.bd/.

mahdin@thedailystar.net

[StarTech] TechSpotlight – The power of Bangla

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=78544

CRBLP of BRAC University unveils two revolutionary software

The image left shows how a scanned image has been converted to editable Bangla unicode text with the OCR application, right, a screen shot of the ‘Katha’ application that reads aloud any Bangla text when typed.

Imagine a blind person being able to use a computer almost as efficiently as someone with eyes! All he does is take the mouse cursor to a certain position in the screen and the computer reads him aloud whatever button there is. That too in Bangla!

This, and a few more marvels would now be available for free to all the people who want to use Bangla for many different reasons in their everyday lives thanks to two newly released products by CRBLP (Center for Research for Bangla Language Processing) of BRAC University.

On February 19, CRBLP announced the first official release of its Bangla language processing software packages ‘Katha’ (text-to-speech) and BanglaOCR (optical character recognition). In the event, the audience (which included experts in the field and several blind people) was shown how the computer could create Bangla unicode text from scanned images and then read out the text.

The TTS and OCR run on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. There is also a web-enabled front-end for the TTS (and under development for the OCR), making these tools available at anytime and from anywhere. Currently, the group is working on better integration with screen readers in collaboration with the vision impaired community.

The Bangla language processing tools developed at CRBLP are free and open source software, released under GNU Public License v2, and supported in part by funding from Canadian IDRC and BRAC University.

“We have come a long way, but we have even a longer way to go” says Dr. Mumit Khan, professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the university and the head of CRBLP. “We are trying to develop capacity for Bangla Language Processing in Bangladesh. These days we are talking about ICT and Digital Bangladesh. If you talk about ICT for a country, you have to localise. And localisation means not only translation, you also need to incorporate local culture for widespread use.”

“We start from very basic spelling checkers and Optical Character recognition. Speech synthesis would enable us not to type but dictate. That would make not only a recording, but also turn it into editable text, where you can check for spellings and grammatical errors. These things are present for the English Language through various softwares. For all this to happen in Bangla, you need a lot of linguistic research at first. And in Bangla we are a bit behind in all this. So for us, the first step was capacity building. It took us a year and a half to find out what we needed to know. So our target was to do something simple yet concrete – make applications that people can use,” he added.

A Corpus (list of words in usage in Bangla, something not found in the dictionary), efficient spell checkers, OCR, machine translation, syntax checking all these are required to make full-scale Bangla computing possible.

So the purpose of the research is to:

1) Build linguistic resource using Corpus

2) Create new applications

3) Develop capacity

These applications will help in different forms of academic research because there is a huge literacy problem in this country.

The target of TTS includes three kinds of people:

1) The illiterate

2) The Visually impaired

3) People who can’t read Bangla

OCR has infinite applications including fast digitalising of old and rare Bangla books, which would save a lot of time compared to manually typing all the words in those books.

When asked about the inspirations behind developing these applications, Dr Khan mentioned Sightsavers International and the JPUF (Jatiyo Protbondhhi Unnoyon Foundation). Through the usage of these applications, blind people too, can become citizens of the ‘net world’. The sponsors for these projects are the IDRC, Canada (International Development Research Corporation) under its PAN Localisation Project and BRAC University itself.

“At this stage, the text to speech software sounds a bit wooden but we hope to improve on it within the next six months or so. For example, Amar Nam Sanjida sounds like Amar Nam Sa-no-ji-da right now. The good news is that this is just the beginning to even better applications. Future developments would include the female voice, which is an even more difficult thing to do, and intonation inclusive of mood variations, whether the person is angry or in a good mood. Right now we are working on the ‘Broadcast dialect’. Incorporating dialect is an altogether new issue,” he mentioned

At CRBLP, there are 6 researchers in the core group and many other people are affiliated with the research projects including students and teachers from the Dhaka University Linguistics Department (with whom the centre has a MoU) and researchers from 14 other countries.

When asked about the state of research in the field of computer Science in Bangladesh, Dr. Khan said that their sure is room for improvement but research in his field is not totally inexistent as many people would think. Other than CRBLP, he mentioned Prof Saidur Rahman’s (Buet) research on graph theory which is being internationally acclimated.

For more information on the research centre and its activities may visit CRBLP’s website http://www.bracu.ac.bd/research/crblp/.

Short Notes:
1) TTS: The TTS (Text to Speech) application generates speech from Bangla text. This can help tackle illiteracy problem, empower the visually impaired and increase the possibilities of improved machine-interaction. This project has developed a TTS system for Bangla using diphone and unit selection concatenation techniques based on the Festival speech synthesis technology. The developers in this project are Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib and Kamrul Hayder.

2) OCR: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting printed text images to editable text. This project has developed a Bangla OCR that takes the scanned image of a printed page or document as input and converts it into editable Unicode text. The developers in this project are Md. Abul Hasnat and Souro Chowdhury.

[StarTech] TechSpotlight – Banks get tech smart

http://www.thedailystar.net/pf_story.php?nid=71473

Photo: Syed Zakir Hossain

The commercial banks in Bangladesh are fast catching up with the rest of the world in terms of the use of the most advanced technologies. Starting from online banking and SMS banking, we have also seen the arrival of innovative technologies like the mobile ATM and many more.

Also, experts are of the opinion that the level of use of e-commerce in Bangladesh is not satisfactory enough due to different bureaucratic and policy constraints. This week in Star-Tech, we will try to have a look at where the banks in Bangladesh currently stand in terms of the use of technology in their systems.

Credit/Debit Cards: Once a status symbol, the use of Credit/Debit or ATM Cards has now become an absolute necessity for the urban folk of Dhaka and other major cities of the country. With most of the commercial banks offering card services and with relative ease of making one compared to earlier times, Cards have become immensely popular for account holders ranging from university students to CEOs of corporate firms. Risks of carrying heavy cash, ease of withdrawal/disposal, availability of ATM booths in all neighbourhoods and the acceptance of VISA/Mastercard cards at more and more shops mean that a higher number of people are now opting for ‘plastic money’.

DBBL (Dutch Bangla Bank Limited) has the highest number of ATM booths all across the country, and with the launch of the Mobile ATM booths, the first of its kind in Bangladesh, the bank has made access to its ATM booths even easier.

Online Banking: Internet/Online banking application of different banks address the needs of small, individual and corporate account holders. These applications provide a comprehensive range of banking services that enable the customers to meet most of their banking requirements over the Internet, thus avoiding the hassles of having to physically travel to the bank for each and every monetary transaction/update. The services generally seen in different banks offering online banking services include:

(1)Account Operations and Inquiries

(2) Fund Transfers and Payments: The customer can choose to transfer funds by selecting different mode of transfers. Funds can be transferred between accounts of the corporate, to a third party account or to other banks using prevalent payment systems.

(3) Utility Bill Payment (Electricity, Gas, Telephone and Water) from the Customers’ Savings or Checking Accounts

(4) Deposits

(5) Loans

(6) Other services: This includes monitoring up to date information about the different transactions (deposits and withdrawals) of the account instead of having to wait for the normal printed summary that comes once in every three months!

In this regard, we took an interview of Shahadat Hossain Shohag, the FVP (First Vice President) and Head of Cards of UCBL (United Commercial Bank Limited). Following are the excerpts:

Star Tech (ST): What is the current state of the use of technology in different banks in Bangladesh?

Shahadat Hossain Shohag (SHS): Currently the use of technology in banking industry is very huge. The second and third generation private sector banks are leading in terms of using technology in banking practice and services. First generation banks are not so far behind either. For example, UCBL has the largest online network connecting its 84 branches through out the country. Also the government sector banks are coming forward, slowly but steadily to taste the comfort of technology.

ST: What is the total number of plastic cards (debit/credit/ATM) currently in Bangladesh and at what rate it is growing?

(SHS): At present, up to 25 banks are in card businesses in Bangladesh. Number of credit cards is approximately 300,000 with 200,000 debit cards. There are around 500,000 ATM cards currently in use in the country. New banks are coming in card business but growth rate is still medium, standing at approximately 30-40% now.

ST: UCBL is considered to be one of the pioneers in the dual currency credit cards? How popular has this project been in Bangladesh?

(SHS): UCBL has made the venture of dual currency credit cards a success in Bangladesh. All the older credit card issuing banks are introducing dual currency credit card to emulate the success of UCBL in card business. The banks that are interested to enter card business are thinking of dual mood in almost all cases.

ST: How would you evaluate the current state of e-commerce in Bangladesh?

(SHS): To be honest, I am not convinced with the current status of e-commerce in Bangladesh. This is available in a very small scale. But the matter of hope is that banks are showing interest on this issue. Hopefully within some months UCBL will introduce e-commerce.

I do not see massive activities on e-commerce in Bangladesh. Till date all efforts are seemed to be not so efficient. But respective people have started to realise that it is a demand of time. So, I believe that in the near future we will be able to see remarkable development in e-commerce business.

ST: What services is UCBL offering which uses the new methods of technology (Plastic Cards/Online Banking/SMS Banking)?

(SHS): UCBL is getting richer in providing technology based services. Presently it has credit card business, online banking and SMS banking. Very shortly it is going to introduce debit card, ATM card, prepaid card & ATM services.

[StarTech] TechSpotlight – Sci-Tech 2009: What to look forward to

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=69567

2009   promises to be yet another promising year for the world of Science and Technology. 2009 has already been declared the ‘International year of Astronomy’ and many other high tech gadgets, automobiles and electrical appliances, due to hit the markets all through the year, promises a great year ahead of us.

We at StarTech, tried to find out what 2009 promises us and the following is a sneak peek of the year ahead of us:

The International Year of Astronomy 2009
The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.

The vision of such a declaration is to ensure everyone realizes the impact of astronomy and other fundamental sciences on our daily lives, and understand how scientific knowledge can contribute to a more equitable and peaceful society. IYA2009 activities will take place locally, nationally, regionally and internationally. National Nodes have been formed in each country to prepare activities for 2009. These nodes will establish collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers, science centres and science communicators to prepare activities for 2009. Already now, 135 countries are involved and well over 140 are expected to participate eventually.

To help coordinate this huge global programme and to provide an important resource for the participating countries, the IAU has established a central Secretariat and an IYA2009 website (www.astronomy2009.org) as the principal IYA2009 resource for all interested.

Cell Phone as Credit Card!
Behold! If you happen to live in Canada, by Mid-2009, you can wave your mobile phone for the ultimate freedom to purchase all you need at supermarkets, restaurants and anywhere else for that matter. Visa (International Credit Card Company) and Rogers Wireless (Canada) have come together for the next phase of the mobile phone payment pilot, which will ultimately allow Canadians the flexibility to make purchases securely at the point of sale with a wave of their mobile phone. The customer phase of the mobile phone payment pilot is expected to launch in mid-2009, following a brief employee pilot.

Designed to be a fast and convenient way for customers to pay for small purchases, pilot participants will be issued specially-equipped mobile phones that can simply be waved at Visa payWave-enabled checkout readers at select retail stores and quick-service restaurants in Toronto’s downtown core.

As part of the pilot, Motorola mobile phones outfitted with Near Field Communication (NFC) contactless chips will enable customers to make purchases using the Visa payWave feature just as they would with a contactless RBC Visa card. The functions tested in the pilot will include the secure delivery and storage of account information to the mobile phone and the security of mobile payments at retailers.

African Industry Boom
Africa is by definition an outlier. It’s a whole continent that, for the most part, is completely decoupled from the world economy and subsequently peoples expectations of what it can contribute. People here are looked at as offering very little, if anything, to the world community especially when it comes to technological innovation. 25 of the poorest nations on the planet are all in Africa and the world economic crisis is only compounding that fact. What this means is the world isn’t paying attention to Africa…at all. It’s up to Africans to capitalize on this underestimation. Malcolm Gladwell, in his most recent book OUTLIERS, writes about jewish lawyers who were the industry outcasts of the early twentieth century in New York. Fast forward a few years and the entire landscape changed, making those who were marginalized early on were subsequently placed in the perfect position to dominate an entire industry. Could the same thing happen to Africa? Definitely, the mobile phone market here is proving to be successful beyond most expectations just five years ago. Other industries are also predicting growth in 2009.

Cumulus Solutions for Developing Countries
‘The cloud’ is an elusive technological beast that happily thrives in the world of billion dollar data centers in the west. But there are currently about three billion people untouched by the internet across Asia, South America and Africa. Look for a number of CDN(Content delivery network)’s to try to penetrate these emerging markets by offering mobile services, alternative energy powered data centers and hyper-local hosting solutions.

Innovations in Water Technology
The one resource that the world needs more than anything else on the planet is being strained by over population, pollution, and global warming. Researchers speculate that in 2009, we’ll see a tipping point of innovations in water technologies. Whether it’s simple solutions like the Water Cone (http://www.watercone.com /product.html) or more advanced things like Max Water (http://www.waterunlimited.com.au/).

Predictions On Google
ZDNet’s Garett Rogers: Google’s Chrome browser will grab as much as 15 percent of the browser market as it begins being preinstalled on new PCs. Google will also see solid financial gains as its sharemarket value is likely to soar high.

- Psychic Celia: Google’s going to grow three times bigger. “There’s a company that’ll get involved with Google that will make it go that much higher this year. It will be a company that advertises.”

- Psychic Shaun: Google’s growth is going to slow — unless it finds the right new idea. “They need to come up and do something that’s going to knock it out of the ballpark.”

[StarTech] TechSpotlight – Experts on ICT Roadmap – Better skilled manpower holds the key

http://thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=62180

The ICT roadmap in Bangladesh has been a much talked-about issue in recent times. Although the country has been using these technologies since the 1960s, broader use started in 1986 with the formation of Bangladesh Computer Council (BCC). Afterwards, the 1997 recommendations on ICT development and the 2002 ICT policy were formulated. More recently, the government formed an e-government cell at the chief advisor’s office, and completed an e-government horizon scan report last December.

Although a national policy on ICT was adopted in 2002, the Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology had not been able to achieve the goals set out for e-governance in the policy. This led the present government to appoint Spinnovation and DNet (together with an international partner, Gov3 Limited) to develop a short, medium and long-term national ICT action plan or roadmap for Bangladesh on the basis of the National ICT Policy 2002.

Accordingly, recommendations on the national ICT roadmap have been made to the government. There are five key work-streams in the roadmap which are further broken down into 13 mission critical projects.

This week in StarTech, we have tried to find out expert opinions, from academia and industry, on this issue.

Before going to their opinions, let’s first take a quick look at the five key work-streams that have been recommended by the consultants.

Empowering citizens
One of the objectives under this project is to ensure that by 2011 all Bangladeshis will have access to ICT and the skills to use them. The ICT roadmap plans to deliver this by building a national partnership to establish tele-centres. Another objective is to ensure that digital contents in Bangla are easily produced and uploaded. The ICT roadmap will deliver this through a new national strategy for e-Bangla.

Transforming public resources
To transform the government, Bangladesh needs to have e-readiness. There have to be citizen-centric e-services, and a high demand for them (through a rich mix of channels–including mobile phones, web, kiosks and service centres). Every ministry must develop and deliver plans for e-service investments.

Broadening the ICT sector
The issues impeding the growth of the hardware and software sectors should be resolved to broaden the ICT sector. International ICT trade and investment campaign must be undertaken to develop a globally recognised brand for Bangladesh as a centre for ICT investment, outsourcing and exports.

Enabling the market
Legal barriers to e-commerce must be removed and the necessary business changes put in place in the public and private sectors to take advantage of the new opportunities. The ICT roadmap plans to deliver this by establishing a certified authority to oversee the provision of digital certificates enabled by the ICT Act 2006, and development of a partnership with the banks to establish the business and technical infrastructure needed to make e-commerce and e-government transactions a reality.

Leadership and governance
Accountability for delivering all aspects of the roadmap and associated elements must be clear to all stakeholders for successful delivery of the roadmap, and effective structures and processes must be in place. A full-time “chief digital adviser” reporting directly to the taskforce and the chief adviser, supported by a small ICT roadmap program management office, should be there to strengthen the governance.

Now we move on to opinions expressed by Prof Muhammed Kaykobad of computer science and engineering department at Buet; Mustafa Jabbar, president, Bangladesh Computer Samity (BCS) and CEO, Ananda Computers; and Habibullah N Karim, president of BASIS.

StarTech wanted to know what they think should be the key ingredients in the ICT roadmap of Bangladesh and what, according to them, are the job prospects for private university graduates compared to those graduating from public institutions.

We also wanted to how the ACM-ICPC programming contests that are gaining fast popularity among computer science students in Bangladesh could improve their programming skills.

They also talked about the role of the government in decreasing the digital divide in the country.

Prof Kaykobad: Education, quality education, not only in ICT courses but in all levels of education should be the most important single ingredient for ICT roadmap of Bangladesh. The only surplus in the country is human beings that we cannot utilise for national prosperity and develop properly. Investment in education is unacceptably low and we possibly cannot foresee a change of attitude of our political leadership in this respect. Again application of ICT can make up the dearth of resources in education sector.

Investment in and priority of education have changed the fate of countries like South Korea and it is likely to have similar impact on our country as well. We should not loudly talk about globalisation. India never did.

We must be able to develop software systems of our own. If we cannot make it or maintain them, what is the point of using rocket technology? We should shun the path of being non-productive! We must produce at least as much as we consume. India has successfully done it.

After independence they failed to produce even blades of acceptable quality. Today, they are sending rockets to the moon. In early days they sacrificed the temptation of using quality Japanese products, from electronics to clothes. Now they have developed so much of expertise and we still remain mere consumers!

We must have software systems for ensuring e-governance and for other national interests by our professionals and will in no case allow different offices to keep black boxes developed by foreigners about which we hardly have any knowledge.

There is not much difference in job prospect of private and public universities. Since we are yet to generate sufficient amount of jobs inside the country, our entrepreneurs are quite often opting for low salary to quality of expertise. In fact, quality of education in our country is going down whether it is public or private.

These contests do improve problem-solving skill, creativity, programming skill and aptitude significantly. This is why world famous universities like MIT, CalTech, Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard are giving so much importance to ACM programming contests. Even if we do not understand its usefulness, we should just follow the footprint of these famous institutions even without understanding. World famous companies like Microsoft and Google are chasing after contestants with lucrative job offers.

The government can distribute computers and other ICT accessories to schools and colleges of remote areas so that ICT tolls like computer aided learning (CAL) packages can make up for deficiencies in experiences and quality of teachers. Schools and colleges can be enriched with an ICT lab where students of different classes will be learning different CAL packages to improve their understanding.

Mustafa Jabbar: In my opinion ICT roadmap should be targeted at establishing a digital Bangladesh which will lead to a knowledge-based society. The government should first set a target to change its own way of working. There should first be a digital government.

Unfortunately the graduates coming from these institutions are not learning state of the art technologies to work in our software industry. The syllabus, teaching method and the quality of teachers are key elements to improve the situation.

I do not feel that only this competition is improving the situation. Unless the basic education system is not improved, this will help may be only the BUET students.

The government should give computers to every kid and every house should be connected with broadband internet.

Habibullah N Karim: It must have an overarching vision for the nation which will be the beacon/goal of the roadmap.

It should have five components–legal framework issues resolution, ICT infrastructure development, e-government implementation with specific deliverables, making effective use of public-private-partnership opportunities for faster build up of ICT capacity and IT human resource development in sync with market demand.

The roadmap must be consistent with the overall ICT policy of the nation and must be implementation-focused.

The job prospects vary depending on the skillsets of the graduating students. For jobs that require broad technical excellence, graduates from public universities seem to do better but where communication skills are more important the private university graduates fare better. This is a rough generalisation and there are exceptions to both.

Such contests help build problem-solving skills and is a great confidence builder. These contests have proven a great boon for Bangladesh as these provided a platform for Bangladeshis to hone their skills in competition with the best from the whole world and we showed the world that we can hold our own when it comes to technical ability.

Broadband must be made available at very low cost at all parts of the country without any urban-rural discrimination. Modern WiMAX and 3G technologies will allow this at not-too-great a cost. Distance IT learning should be promoted to overcome the lack of qualified teachers in remote areas. The nearly 10,000 idle laptops lying with the Election Commission should be distributed to schools and colleges in remote areas for use by students.

The ICT roadmap must be done in consultation with all the stakeholders and shared with all sections of the society so that there is firm ownership of the goals and activities enumerated in the plan. The new ICT Policy 2008 recommended to the government by a committee comprising representatives of all stakeholder groups contains definitive action plans that can form the cornerstone of any ICT roadmap the nation wants to take on.

Information about the five work-streams are taken from: Article on ICT in Bangladesh by TIM Nurul Kabir ( September 18, 2008)