CCSE Reading Group: Waqar Nabi on ReCompute.pk

Published: 14 November 2022

Dr Waqar Nabi presents a new initiative to create impact in higher education CS in Pakistan.

TITLE: Higher Education in Computer Science and Software Engineering in Pakistan – Creating an Impact (or, at least trying to)
SPEAKERS: Dr Waqar Nabi, Dr Junaid Akhtar and Dr Noman Javed
DATE: 30th January 2023
TIME: 13:00-14:00
DESCRIPTION:

This talk will be centred around the "ReCompute.pk" initiative that originated two years ago, with a focus on university-level CS education in Pakistan. The inspiration actually came in part from CCSE!

We have many aspirations, and a few plans as well, but our main activity so far has been publishing podcasts that explore higher education in Pakistan from different vantage points. Although our interest is primarily in computing, many of our podcasts are about higher education in general. We will summarize the observation we have made across our podcasts, and focus on the following aspects particularly which we felt are of a wider interest:

  1. What works well when teaching introductory programming courses
  2. What do people in the tech industry think is problematic with academia in Pakistan
  3. What we learnt by talking directly with students from three different Pakistani universities

We will also talk briefly about our other initiatives: a reading group, and a recently completed a study related to impact -- mostly on quality of teaching -- of the singular focus on "impact-factor" publications at Pakistani Universities.

We'd love to get feedback on, among other things: what patterns and observations might be more general across the academia rather than specific to Pakistan, how to improve rigour in our work, how to scale its reach and impact, and if there are other opportunities that this collaboration can create.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

The talk will be delivered by Waqar Nabi, Lecturer at School of Computing Science and member of CCSE. He will be joined by his collaborators and co-founders of ReCompute.pk:

  • Dr Junaid Akhtar, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Namal University, Pakistan, with specialization in Machine Learning.
  • Dr Noman Javed, Postdoctoral Researcher at LSE, currently working on the Genetically Evolving Models in Science (GEMS) project.

First published: 14 November 2022

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Speaker: Dr Syed Waqar Nabi