Dr. Umar Saif, Associate Professor, School of Science and Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the top 35 innovators (TR35) in the world. He is the first Pakistani scholar to have been selected for the prestigious TR35 award in the last decade. The TR35 recognizes the world’s top 35 young innovators that are radically transforming technology.
Their work spanning medicine, computing, communications, energy, electronics and nanotechnology-is changing our world, according to MIT Technology Review. Dr. Saif has been honoured for his work on technologies for the developing-world.
Technologies developed by Dr. Saif’s research group and startups are used by millions of people in the developing world, especially 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 four billion SMS for users in Pakistan.
Dr. Saif joins an elite group of researchers and entrepreneurs selected over the last decade. Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, Jonathan Ive, the chief designer at Apple, David Karp, founder of Tumbler; Harvard Professor Al n Aspuru-Guzik for his work on Quantum computers, and MIT Neuroscientist Ed Boyden, one of the inventors of the emerging field of optogenetics, which makes it possible to control neurons with light.
MIT Technology Review selects the top innovators after a rigorous evaluation process. The judges, who are leading experts in their fields from universities such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard, consider hundreds of high-impact researchers and entrepreneurs from all over the world, out of which top 35 are chosen for the award.
“This year’s group of TR35 recipients is driving the next wave of trans formative technology and making an impact on the way we live, work and interact”, said Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of the MIT Technology Review.
Before moving to Pakistan, Saif worked at MIT and received a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust.
Previous Achievements by Umar Saif
- Some good press for two startups at SCI. PBS ran a story on See`n`report’s impact on enabling citizen journalism in Pakistan and its use during the recent floods in Pakistan. The article on SMSall (formerly ChOpaal) tells the story of how it grew from a small university project to the largest SMS Social Network in Pakistan. SMSall has sent over 3 Billion SMS for hundreds of thousands of people in Pakistan (and recently in other countries).
- After two years of hard work, we’ve released our BitTorrent client for the developing-world, called BitMate, with great reviews by CNN, New York Times, GigaOm and many others. Within three days of releasing the BitMate client, we already have thousands of downloads. BitMate improves the performance of low-bandwidth BitTorrent clients by more than 70%, without cheating or adversely effecting the performance of higher bandwidth peers. Read the story on New York Times . Update: BitMate has close to 30,000 users from 173 countries.
- Along with a group of other World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders (YGL), we have launched a new YGL Task Force on using ICT for Development (ICTD). We ran a small pilot project on using SMS for Education. Planning to start a larger project on building a disease outbreak detection system.
- All the good work by teams at SCI and Dritte is paying off. I was named a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum in 2010.
- Pakistan’s largest English newspaper Dawn has published an article on our incubator — Saif Center of Innovation (SCI) — and our citizen journalism startup See`n`Report .
- Our work on Grassroots technologies received the MIT Global Indus Technovator Award!
- Prof. Richard Anderson and his team has made a video of the collaborative course between UW (Seattle), Microsoft Research (Redmond) and LUMS, Pakistan.
- Two of my startups ChOpaal.pk and SeeNreport.com won the Annual ICT PASHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association) Awards, 2008 and were shortlisted to represent Pakistan in the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA’08) in Jakarta.
- I was awarded the CIO IDG Technology Pioneer Award . The inaugural CIO awards were given to those who helped shape the Pakistan software industry in the last 10 years. Given that I was still an undergrad 10 years ago, I am humbled by the recognition of our recent entrepreneurial activities (BumpIn.com, ChOpaal.pk and SeeNreport.com )
- My dream startup incubator is finally online in Lahore! My three startups — BumpIn.com, ChOpaal.pkand SeeNreport.com — become the first citizens of S.C.I.
- Our research on Goal-oriented adaptive systems received the Mark Weiser Award at IEEE Percom’08. Watch videos of our two goal-oriented systems: Goal-oriented Sockets [Follow-Me-Video] and Goal-oriented Programming System [Adaptive Teleconference].
- Our Poor Man’s broadband system for the developing-world was featured in the New Scientist and theMIT Technology Review. Our paper was selected to appear in a compendium of best papers from ICTD’07 in a special issue of the ITID Journal.
- Our collaboration with UC Berkeley’s TIER group received funding from NAS/US State Department and HEC. We will be working on Rural WiFi and inverse-multiplexed GPRS Networks, Developing-world “Teleputer” and Poor Man’s Akamai with Eric Brewer‘s group. Check out the Dritte pages for updates.
- Our three-way course on “Computing for the Developing-world” with University of Washington and Microsoft Research was broadcast live between three sites. 20 odd students attend the course from LUMS (at 6AM Pakistan time). We learned many interesting lessons in using technology for International Distance Education (published in 13th CSCWD conference).
- Our collaborative project with MIT on Disease Epidemiology in Pakistan received funding from PITB. We will be focusing on TB and Malaria in Punjab.
- Poor Man’s Broadband received funding from the Microsoft Research (MSR) Digital Inclusion Program. This is the first time MSR has funded a research project in Pakistan.