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LUMS Dr. umar Saif receive Google Faculty Research Award

Lahore: 08 Dec: Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) Lahore has announced that Dr. Umar Saif, Associate Professor, Computer Science, LUMS is the first Pakistani to win the prestigious Google Faculty Research Award. He gets this award for his research work funded by the US State Department.
The US$ 100,000 Google Faculty Research Award makes Dr. Saif the first faculty member in a Pakistani university to receive the competitive grant, awarded for the low-cost rural telephony systems that he has been working on for the past three years along with colleagues at UC Berkeley. His collaborators on the research include Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure at Google, currently on leave from his work as Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley, Tapan Parikh, Assistant Professor at the iSchool at UC Berkeley and Kurtis Heimerl, a graduate student working with Dr. Brewer.
Dr. Saif was also the first Pakistani to be acknowledged by the MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators (TR35). He was honoured for his work on technologies for the developing-world which are being used by millions of people. Notable among the many of these are: BitMate - that enhances the speed of Internet in the developing-world using peer-to-peer technology, and SMSall.pk - Pakistan’s largest SMS Social Network which has sent close to 4 billion SMS for users in Pakistan.
Dr. Saif is currently on leave from LUMS, working as the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB).
More on www.lums.edu.pk

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