LAHORE: A LUMS professor for technology has been named by the MIT Technology Review as one of their 35 World’s Top Young Innovators for the year 2011.
**This the first time in the past decade that a Pakistani has been recognised by the MIT Technology Review. He now joins an elite group of researchers and technologists including the likes of Google’s Seregy Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
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“The TR35 recognizes the world’s top 35 young innovators that are radically transforming technology as we know it. Their work – spanning medicine, computing, communications, energy, electronics and nanotechnology – is changing our world”, according to MIT Technology Review.
**Dr Umar Saif, an associate professor at the LUMS School of Science of Engineering has been recognised for two of his innovations
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BitMate
The first a software, BitMate to help reduce download times using peer-to-peer technology for dial-up slow internet connections. The software released in February, has so far been downloaded 30, 000 times in 173 countries.
SMSall.pk
His second innovation, SMSall.pk, is a mass SMS social network that has so far sent out four billion SMS for users in Pakistan.
The MIT Technology Review selects the top innovators after a rigorous evaluation process. 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.
**“We are immensely proud of this recognition for Dr Saif and of how it reflects on the cutting edge work being done at our young School of Science and Engineering”, said Adil Najam, Vice Chancellor of LUMS. “Dr Saif’s work demonstrates not only the potential for innovation in technology for development but also the level of enterprise and expertise that already exists within Pakistan and the larger developing world.”
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**Dr Saif has won numerous awards for his innovative technology solutions for the developing-world. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010.
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**He is a recipient of the MIT Technovator Award (Grassroot Technologies); Mark Weiser Award for best paper award at PERCOM, the top rated conference in the field of pervasive computing; Digital Inclusion Award from Microsoft Research and the IDG CIO Technology Pioneer Award.
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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.
http://www.kalam.tv/ur/video/87323/index.html
Making us all proud!! hats off to him 
