Dr Ashraf Masood and Dr Mohammad Hassan Zaidi from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) were declared winners of the 5th NCR awards in the categories of "IT research and development" and "IT educationist" respectively.
Ashraf Masood is an active researcher in the rare area of IT security and cryptography in Pakistan.
He has designed and developed several IT security-related products, including VPN security gateway, secure messaging terminal, secure communication devices for wireless applications and multi-channel speech compression system.
The products developed have significantly helped towards import substitution, self-reliance, industrial support and human resource development. Above all, his research has contributed to the strengthening of IT security at the national level.
In addition to the recent award, Dr Zaidi, who is an excellent academician and the Head of Academics at NUST Institute of Information Technology (NHT) has also had the distinction of winning 2001 NCR Excellence Award in the category of IT research and development.
He has about 20 years of experience in teaching and research and development in IT-related fields and has published 35 research papers in prestigious international journals/conferences.
Dr Zaidi has played a pivotal role in designing NIIT's PhD/MIT curriculum and contributed in setting the academic policy of the institute. More recently he has established a MIT networking research group for undertaking hi-tech networking projects.
He has developed various e-learning programmes for NUST IT Wing and has developed online contents on various IT-related topics.
On the basis of his efforts he was selected for the joint venture between NUST and Softlight Inc Canada for development of a model e-course in data communication and security at Post Graduate level based on the Axis learning system.
Dr Zaidi has also organised several national/international workshops/conferences.