RIYADH, 6 May — Prince Fahd ibn Abdullah, assistant minister of defense for civil aviation affairs and chairman of the Kingdom’s Offset Program Committee, will open a technology seminar in Riyadh next week.
The two-day event, being organized by Lucent Technologies in cooperation with King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology, will feature the research expertise of Bell Labs whose researchers have won 11 Nobel prizes so far.
Now in its fourth year, the event will give a profile of Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent, so far responsible for over 30,000 inventions, said Dr. Rumaih Muhammad Al-Rumaih, chairman of the seminar organizing committee. These range from the transistor to laser, communications satellite to fiber optics.
Lucent will field a team of scientists to speak on the latest generation communications systems. The topics include architecture wars and next generation networks, planning future networks, wireless technologies evolution, Internet and software advances and optical networking research.
Lucent has so far trained over 800 Saudi nationals in computer applications, technical products training and management courses. Muhammad Ali Al-Dhallan, Lucent’s director of public affairs, said the company had launched a global scholars program to encourage the youths to pursue careers in communications technology. “Open to students of leading universities around the world, scholars for year 2000 were recently selected from among 19 countries including Saudi Arabia,” he noted.
Lucent has also established the “Bughshan-Bell Labs Chair in Telecommunications” at the King Fahd University for Petroleum and Minerals with a substantial grant. It has 2,200 employees in the Kingdom, more than 600 of them Saudis.
