ALKHOBAR, 8 June 2004 — In the midst of the ongoing turmoil in Saudi Arabia, millions of students have been taking their final exams. Tens of thousands of teenagers are also attending graduation ceremonies in the Kingdom and trying to have a little fun and celebration despite the local atmosphere of doom and gloom. It doesn’t seem fair that one of the most important milestones in these young people’s lives will be marred by the misery of the moment.
This year a student dear to me will be graduating from an international school in Dammam. Normally, for such an occasion, I just stop at the mall and quickly pick up something nice. This year though I wanted the young man to feel special. Soon he will be leaving Saudi Arabia and everything he knows, and going off into the world alone. I wanted to make that transition easier.
After looking at several different gift options, I finally settled on the Nomad MuVo (Model #MUVOSQH15) from Creative. This is a compact 1.5GB digital music player. The Nomad stores up to 50 hours of Windows Media Audio (WMA) or 25 hours of MP3 tracks with up to 10 hours of continuous playback. The Nomad also works as a USB flash drive with any PC to store up to 1,000 floppy disks of data. The device charges through a USB connection or with a power adapter. The Nomad player, earphones, rechargeable battery, power adapter, USB cable, case, music management software come together for SR825. This version of the Nomad was introduced in the US at least nine months ago, but arrived in the Kingdom just recently.
My graduate will be able to store his music, address book, essential data and some photos on the Nomad to take with him when he leaves for college. Once he gets his new PC up and running there, transferring over the data will be simple. And I’m sure the Nomad will continue to be an essential part of managing data storage and data transfers throughout his college career.
For those who can’t afford something as pricey as the Nomad, I would still recommend some sort of USB storage device as the gift of choice for any graduate. In the Kingdom a good quality 128MB USB mobile disk runs about SR150, 256MB is SR260 and 512MB can be had for about SR500. There is also a four in one device called the MSI Mega Stick that does MP3, voice recording, 128MB USB storage and FM radio access. It retails for about SR370. Storage is a practical gift that’s very much in style.
And speaking of style, one of the Pakistani IT prodigies we have been following in this column over the past few years, Afrah Shafquat, is still taking her nation by storm — in her own way of course. A few months back, Teradata, a division of NCR, hosted the fifth national awards ceremony in Islamabad to recognize outstanding Pakistani IT professionals in nine categories.
The event was attended by leading dignitaries and prominent personalities from the government as well as banking, insurance, airlines and other leading industries.
Speaking on the occasion NCR Country General Manager Syed Veqar ul Islam said: “The IT Excellence Awards are designed to motivate outstanding individuals for doing an outstanding job for Pakistan. They will also serve as encouragement for others to perform well in the future.”
Among the award winners for the year 2003, Afrah Shafquat took the Award for IT Youth based on her two world records in international IT certification:
• World’s youngest Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP) on Feb. 14, 2002 at the age of 11 years, five months and 19 days.
• World’s youngest Microsoft Certified VB.Net Programmer (Exam No. 70-306) on July 23, at the age of 12 years, 10 months and 28 days.
Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari, Pakistan’s minister of information technology & telecommunications, sent Afrah a note on the occasion. He wrote in part:
“I am writing to personally congratulate you on winning the 5th NCR IT Excellence Award in the “IT Youth” category. Your achievements, and those of your sisters, are indeed exemplary and this award is hence a recognition of your achievements at the global level. I understand that your speech at the event was particularly powerful. With young people such as yourselves, I am confident that the future of our country is in safe hands.”
For those of you who might be unaware of the Shafquat family, Afrah Shafquat is the youngest of the three Shafquat sisters who together have passed 11 international certifications and hold nine world records at the moment in the field of information technology. All three sisters acquired their IT education from Operation Badar which is an IT education movement in Pakistan. Afrah is currently a student of class eight (O-level Foundation) at White House Grammar School, Karachi. She may be contacted through [email protected].
I would also like to draw your attention today to an excellent initiative from the United Arab Emirates University. Noting that one person is injured every two hours, and one person is killed every 15 hours in a road accident in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the university plans to work with IBM on a device aimed at reducing traffic collisions.
“These statistics are very alarming, especially when one considers that the UAE has some of the best maintained highways in the world,” said Dr. Ali Alnoaimi, deputy vice chancellor for academic affairs, UAE University.
Interested in finding a way to improve road safety, the university has signed an agreement with IBM’s Engineering & Technology Services organization to design, develop and test what the school has termed a telematics “smart box,” a tool similar to the so-called black box found in aircraft, which can capture, analyze and deliver relevant data via a wireless network. The university’s College of Information Technology is co-developing the smart box with IBM.
The device, using multiple microprocessors based on IBM’s Power Architecture, plus a multitude of other sensors, can be attached to the automobile’s carriage to, for example, monitor the vehicle’s speed, comparing it to the speed limit of the street. If the car’s speed is higher than the speed limit allowed by the traffic department, the box would talk to the driver and issue a verbal warning. The device can also be used by police to track gross speeding violations.
“Such a device could be very effective in reducing road accidents,” Dr. Alnoaimi said.
He added that the box is currently in the concept stage. The first one should be ready for a pilot in four or five months. In the pilot, the university’s College of IT will team with IBM, the country’s Center of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT), and the local police departments within the UAE. The team will define the requirements, test the box in UAE cars and then decide what to record, what actions to take to expand the area of application and what languages to support since the device “talks” to the drivers.
The box, which isn’t expected to be much larger than a typical PDA, leverages a number of specific software applications, including Global Positioning System (GPS) and IBM’s speech software, ViaVoice, Bluetooth enablement and open standards communication interfaces.
IBM and the university are also investigating the possibility of enabling this box to function as a doorway to value-added web-based services for drivers and other third parties, such as insurance companies.
(Comments to: [email protected].)
