A Future with Bioengineering: UIT University Hosts National Symposium

on 23/06/2023

UIT University organized a one-day Symposium on Saturday 29th April, In the symposium guest speakers highlighted the recent developments in Genetic and Bio-engineering that are likely to bring drastic changes to society in the near future, much like how computer technology has transformed the world.
The symposium brings together scientists, technologists, educationalists, students, and entrepreneurs to deliberate some of the amazing challenges and opportunities that are being unfolded with “Gene-editing”, “Synthetic biology” and “Engineering with biology”.
The First National Symposium on Bio-Engineering, a full-day event with 18 distinguished speakers with foreign training, leading the discussions, covered application areas such as Agriculture, Health Sciences, and Engineering Materials. Educationalists proposed steps needed to introduce the subject at the school and college level, whereas business leaders were invited to explore economic opportunities for new startups and businesses.
While addressing the symposium Chancellor of UIT University Mr. Hussain Hasham said that the World is changing very fast with new technologies that’s why UIT University is thinking about immerging in the new field of BioScience, Biotechnology, and bio Engineering.
Sameer Hoodbhoy, Parvez Hoodbhoy, Dr. Athar Asama, Dr. Zahra Hasan, Dr. Shahpar Mirza, and Dr. Stephen Lyone were the guests at the symposium.

Business Ready replaces Doing Business project World Bank launches new business climate model

on 23/06/2023

The World Bank Group has begun work to assess the business and investment climate in up to 180 economies under its flagship Business Ready project—a key instrument of its new strategy to facilitate private investment, generate employment, and improve productivity to help countries accelerate development in inclusive and sustainable ways, the bank statement on its website says.
It merits mentioning that this has come after embarrassing revelations of data irregularities and favouritism towards China forced it to cancel its flagship rankings two years ago.
Business Ready improves upon and replaces the World Bank Group’s earlier Doing Business project, says the bank.
It reflects a more balanced and transparent approach toward evaluating a country’s business and investment climate—one that has been shaped by recommendations from experts from within and outside the World Bank Group, including governments, the private sector, and civil society organizations. The first annual Business Ready report, covering 54 economies, will be published in the Spring of 2024.
The World Bank Group has published two key documents: the Business Ready Manual and Guide, specifying the detailed protocols and safeguards it has put in place to ensure the integrity of the assessments; and the Business Ready Methodology Handbook, detailing the project’s indicators and scoring methodology. Data collection on the business environment of the initial 54 economies is being done through extensive consultations with regulatory experts and nationally representative World Bank Enterprise Surveys, collected by competitively selected survey companies.
“The World Bank Group is bringing back a fuller and sharper measure of the investment climate of countries—something that is badly needed in a global economy in the midst of a generalized slowdown,” said Indermit Gill, the World Bank Group’s Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. “Governments that do more to make their economies business-ready will do better in reviving private investment, creating jobs, and quickening the transition to cleaner energy.”
The World Bank Group has long been a leader in spurring business-regulatory reforms across the world. Its assessments of the business-enabling environment worldwide helped spur nearly 4,000 regulatory reforms in developing and developed economies over the past two decades. They also significantly advanced academic research in this area, resulting in 4,000 peer-reviewed research papers and at least 10,000 working papers. Countries, moreover, often use these assessments to shape their development strategies.
“The ‘Business Ready’ project represents a new approach to assessing the business and investment climates,” said Norman Loayza, Director of the World Bank’s Indicators Group, which leads the project. “The ‘Business Ready’ approach aims to establish a better balance between the ease of conducting a business and the broader implications for society as a whole. It gives a more positive role for governments, advocating for better public services for businesses. In addition to experts’ assessments, it includes direct information from entrepreneurs and managers on their experience navigating the economy’s business environment.”
Business Ready focuses on 10 topics covering the lifecycle of a firm in the course of starting, operating, or closing or reorganizing its activities: Business Entry, Business Location, Utility Services, Labor, Financial Services, International Trade, Taxation, Dispute Resolution, Market Competition, and Business Insolvency. Over the next three years, the project will grow to cover about 180 economies worldwide annually, starting with 54 economies in 2023-24, 120 economies in 2024-25, and reaching 180 economies in 2025-26.
The project’s objective is reflected in its name—to make each country’s economic environment ready for a dynamic private sector. The name highlights the fact that economies exist in different stages of readiness, and that governments play a key role in creating a business environment that is conducive for sustainable development.
Transparency will be a key feature of Business Ready’s safeguards for data integrity. All information collected by the project—raw granular data, scores, as well as the calculations used to obtain the scores—will be made publicly available on the project website. Moreover, all results presented in the reports will be replicable using straightforward toolkits available on the website.

Over 75 pc of companies look to adopt latest technologies in next 5 years 14 million people will loose jobs in next five years, WEF Future of Jobs Report says

on 23/06/2023

Economic, health and geopolitical trends have created divergent outcomes for labour markets globally in 2023. While tight labour markets are prevalent in high-income countries, low- and lower-middle-income countries continue to see higher unemployment than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
On an individual level, labour-market outcomes are also diverging, as workers with only basic education and women face lower employment levels. At the same time, real wages are declining as a result of an ongoing cost-of living crisis, and changing worker expectations and concerns about the quality of work are becoming more prominent issues globally.
The fourth edition of the Survey has the widest coverage thus far by topic, geography and sector. The Future of Jobs Survey brings together the perspective of 803 companies – collectively employing more than 11.3 million workers – across 27 industry clusters and 45 economies from all world regions.
The Survey covers questions of macrotrends and technology trends, their impact on jobs, their impact on skills, and the workforce transformation strategies businesses plan to use, across the 2023-2027 timeframe.
Technology adoption will remain a key driver of business transformation in the next five years. Over 85% of organizations surveyed identify increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and broadening digital access as the trends most likely to drive transformation in their organization. Broader application of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards within their organizations will also have a significant impact.
The next most-impactful trends are macroeconomic: the rising cost of living and slow economic growth. The impact of investments to drive the green transition was judged to be the sixth-most impactful macro trend, followed by supply shortages and consumer expectations around social and environmental issues.
Though still expected to drive the transformation of almost half of companies in the next five years, the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, increased geopolitical divisions and demographic dividends in developing and emerging economies were ranked lower as drivers of business evolution by respondents.
The largest job creation and destruction effects come from environmental, technology and economic trends.
Among the macro trends listed, businesses predict the strongest net job-creation effect to be driven by investments that facilitate the green transition of businesses, the broader application of ESG standards and supply chains becoming more localized, albeit with job growth offset by partial job displacement in each case.
Climate change adaptation and the demographic dividend in developing and emerging economies also rate high as net job creators. Technological advancement through increased adoption of new and frontier technologies and increased digital access are expected to drive job growth in more than half of surveyed companies, offset by expected job displacement in one-fifth of companies. The net job creation effect places these two trends in 6th and 8th place respectively.
The three key drivers of expected net job destruction are slower economic growth, supply shortages and the rising cost of inputs, and the rising cost of living for consumers. Employers also recognize that increased geopolitical divisions and the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will drive labour market disruption – with an even split between employers who expect these trends to have a positive impact and employers who expect them to have a negative impact on jobs.
Within technology adoption, big data, cloud computing and AI feature highly on likelihood of adoption. More than 75% of companies are looking to adopt these technologies in the next five years. The data also shows the impact of the digitalization of commerce and trade. Digital platforms and apps are the technologies most likely to be adopted by the organizations surveyed, with 86% of companies expecting to incorporate them into their operations in the next five years. E-commerce and digital trade are expected to be adopted by 75% of businesses. The second-ranked technology encompasses education and workforce technologies, with 81% of companies looking to adopt these technologies by 2027. The adoption of robots, power storage technology and distributed ledger technologies rank lower on the list. The impact of most technologies on jobs is expected to be a net positive over the next five years. Big data analytics, climate change and environmental management technologies, and encryption and cyber security are expected to be the biggest drivers of job growth. Agriculture technologies, digital platforms and apps, e-commerce and digital trade, and AI are all expected to result in significant labour market disruption, with substantial proportions of companies forecasting job displacement in their organizations, offset by job growth elsewhere to result in a net positive. All but two technologies are expected to be net job creators in the next five years: humanoid robots and non-humanoid robots. Employers anticipate a structural labour market churn of 23% of jobs in the next five years. This can be interpreted as an aggregate measure of disruption, constituting a mixture of emerging jobs added and declining jobs eliminated. Respondents to this year’s Future of Jobs Survey expect a higher-than-average churn in the Supply Chain and Transportation and Media, Entertainment and Sports industries, and lower-than-average churn in Manufacturing as well as Retail and Wholesale of Consumer Goods. Of the 673 million jobs reflected in the dataset in this report, respondents expect structural job growth of 69 million jobs and a decline of 83 million jobs. This corresponds to a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment. The human-machine frontier has shifted, with businesses introducing automation into their operations at a slower pace than previously anticipated. Organizations today estimate that 34% of all business-related tasks are performed by machines, with the remaining 66% performed by humans. This represents a negligible 1% increase in the level of automation that was estimated by respondents to the 2020 edition of the Future of Jobs Survey. This pace of automation contradicts expectations from 2020 survey respondents that almost half (47%) of business tasks would be automated in the following five years. Today, respondents have revised down their expectations for future automation to predict that 42% of business tasks will be automated by 2027. Task automation in 2027 is expected to vary from 35% of reasoning and decision-making to 65% of information and data processing. But while expectations of the displacement of physical and manual work by machines has decreased, reasoning, communicating and coordinating – all traits with a comparative advantage for humans – are expected to be more automatable in the future. Artificial intelligence, a key driver of potential algorithmic displacement, is expected to be adopted by nearly 75% of surveyed companies and is expected to lead to high churn – with 50% of organizations expecting it to create job growth and 25% expecting it to create job losses. The combination of macrotrends and technology adoption will drive specific areas of job growth and decline:
The fastest-growing roles relative to their size today are driven by technology, digitalization and sustainability. The majority of the fastest growing roles are technologyrelated roles. AI and Machine Learning Specialists top the list of fast-growing jobs, followed by Sustainability Specialists, Business Intelligence Analysts and Information Security Analysts. Renewable Energy Engineers, and Solar Energy Installation and System Engineers are relatively fast-growing roles, as economies shift towards renewable energy. – The fastest-declining roles relative to their size today are driven by technology and digitalization. The majority of fastest declining roles are clerical or secretarial roles, with Bank Tellers and Related Clerks, Postal Service Clerks, Cashiers and Ticket Clerks, and Data Entry Clerks expected to decline fastest. – Large-scale job growth is expected in education, agriculture and digital commerce and trade. Jobs in the Education industry are expected to grow by about 10%, leading to 3 million additional jobs for Vocational Education Teachers and University and Higher education Teachers. Jobs for agricultural professionals, especially Agricultural Equipment Operators, are expected to see an increase of around 30%, leading to an additional 3 million jobs. Growth is forecast in approximately 4 million digitally enabled roles, such as E-Commerce Specialists, Digital Transformation Specialists, and Digital Marketing and Strategy Specialists.
The largest losses are expected in administrative roles and in traditional security, factory and commerce roles. Surveyed organizations predict 26 million fewer jobs by 2027 in Record-Keeping and Administrative roles, including Cashiers and Ticket Clerks; Data Entry, Accounting, Bookkeeping and Payroll Clerks; and Administrative and Executive Secretaries, driven mainly by digitalization and automation.
Analytical thinking and creative thinking remain the most important skills for workers in 2023. Analytical thinking is considered a core skill by more companies than any other skill and constitutes, on average, 9% of the core skills reported by companies. Creative thinking, another cognitive skill, ranks second, ahead of three self-efficacy skills – resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; and curiosity and lifelong learning – in recognition of the importance of workers ability to adapt to disrupted workplaces.
Dependability and attention to detail, ranks sixth, behind technological literacy. The core skills top 10 is completed by two attitudes relating to working with others – empathy and active listening and leadership and social influence – as well as quality control.
Employers estimate that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the next five years. Cognitive skills are reported to be growing in importance most quickly, reflecting the increasing importance of complex problem-solving in the workplace. Surveyed businesses report creative thinking to be growing in importance slightly more rapidly than analytical thinking. Technology literacy is the third-fastest growing core skill. Self-efficacy skills rank above working with others, in the rate of increase in importance of skills reported by businesses. The socio-emotional attitudes which businesses consider to be growing in importance most quickly are curiosity and lifelong learning; resilience, flexibility and agility; and motivation and self-awareness. Systems thinking, AI and big data, talent management, and service orientation and customer service complete the top 10 growing skills. While respondents judged no skills to be in net decline, sizable minorities of companies judge reading, writing and mathematics; global citizenship; sensory-processing abilities; and manual dexterity, endurance and precision to be of declining importance for their workers. Six in 10 workers will require training before 2027, but only half of workers are seen to have access to adequate training opportunities today. The highest priority for skills training from 2023-2027 is analytical thinking, which is set to account for 10% of training initiatives, on average.

A Hub of Innovation and Opportunity

on 23/06/2023

Silicon Valley is a region located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in California, United States. It is known for being a hub of technology and innovation, home to many of the world’s largest technology companies and startups.
The name “Silicon Valley” comes from the fact that the region was originally known for its large number of silicon chip manufacturers, which were instrumental in the development of the modern computer industry.
Today, Silicon Valley is more broadly used to refer to the entire tech industry and the many companies, entrepreneurs, and investors that make it thrive. Some of the most famous technology companies in the world are based in Silicon Valley, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Tesla, among many others. The region is also known for its many venture capital firms, which fund and support new startups in the hopes of discovering the next big thing in technology.
For young engineers and entrepreneurs from Pakistan, Silicon Valley offers a wealth of opportunities to learn, grow, and make a name for themselves in the tech industry. Many Pakistani engineers have already made their mark in Silicon Valley, working for some of the biggest and most innovative tech companies in the world.
One of the biggest advantages of Silicon Valley for Pakistani young engineers is the abundance of high-paying tech jobs. The region is home to many of the world’s largest and most successful technology companies, which are always on the lookout for talented engineers and developers. Working for one of these companies can provide young engineers with valuable experience, exposure to cutting-edge technologies, and the opportunity to work alongside some of the brightest minds in the industry.
In addition to traditional tech jobs, Silicon Valley is also a hotbed of entrepreneurship and innovation. Many young engineers and entrepreneurs from Pakistan have launched their own startups in Silicon Valley, taking advantage of the region’s supportive ecosystem of investors, mentors, and other resources. Whether it’s developing a new app, launching a hardware product, or solving a complex problem in a new and innovative way, Silicon Valley offers endless opportunities for young engineers to make their mark and build successful careers.
Of course, there are also challenges associated with living and working in Silicon Valley. The region’s high cost of living can be a barrier for some, and competition for tech jobs can be intense. However, for those who are willing to take the leap and pursue their dreams in Silicon Valley, the rewards can be truly life-changing.
Here are some brief examples of new innovations in process in Silicon Valley:
Self-driving cars
Augmented and virtual reality
Artificial intelligence
Sustainable energy
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies
These innovations have the potential to revolutionize transportation, entertainment, healthcare, finance, and more. As the technology industry continues to evolve, Silicon Valley is likely to remain at the forefront of innovation.
In conclusion, Silicon Valley is a hub of innovation and opportunity, offering young engineers and entrepreneurs from Pakistan the chance to work for some of the world’s most innovative companies, launch their own startups, and make a name for themselves in the tech industry. While there are challenges associated with living and working in the region, the rewards can be immense for those who are willing to take risks and pursue their dreams in Silicon Valley.

GFRC as a New Construction Material for Pakistani Market

on 23/06/2023

In recent years, Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete (GFRC) has gained popularity in the construction industry as a versatile and durable material. GFRC offers a wide range of benefits and is becoming increasingly popular in the Pakistani market as an alternative to traditional building materials such as concrete and masonry. This article will provide an overview of GFRC and its advantages, as well as its applications in the Pakistani market.
What is GFRC?
GFRC is a type of reinforced concrete that incorporates glass fibers into the mix. These fibers provide added strength and durability to the material, making it an ideal choice for building applications. GFRC can be used for a variety of architectural and structural applications, including cladding, facades, countertops, and even entire building structures.
Advantages of GFRC
GFRC offers a number of advantages over traditional building materials. Here are some of the key benefits of using GFRC:
Lightweight: GFRC is significantly lighter than traditional concrete, making it easier to transport and install on site.
High Strength: The addition of glass fibers to the mix provides added strength and durability, allowing GFRC to withstand high loads and impacts.
Versatile: GFRC can be molded into a variety of shapes and textures, making it ideal for architectural and decorative applications.
Weather Resistant: GFRC is highly resistant to weathering, UV radiation, and other environmental factors, making it ideal for use in harsh climates.
Low Maintenance: GFRC requires minimal maintenance and is resistant to corrosion, mold, and mildew.
 Applications of GFRC in the Pakistani Market
GFRC is gaining popularity in the Pakistani market as a versatile and durable material that can be used in a variety of applications. Some of the key applications of GFRC in Pakistan include:
Cladding: GFRC panels can be used to clad entire building facades, providing a durable and weather-resistant exterior surface.
Decorative Elements: GFRC can be molded into a variety of shapes and textures, making it ideal for decorative elements such as columns, cornices, and other architectural features.
Countertops and Vanities: GFRC can be used to create durable and attractive countertops and vanities for both residential and commercial applications.
Planters and Outdoor Furniture: GFRC is ideal for creating durable and weather-resistant planters and outdoor furniture for parks, gardens, and other outdoor spaces.
Conclusion
GFRC is a new construction material that is gaining popularity in the Pakistani market due to its versatility, durability, and low maintenance requirements. GFRC offers a wide range of benefits and can be used in a variety of architectural and structural applications. As the construction industry in Pakistan continues to grow and evolve, GFRC is poised to become an increasingly popular choice for building projects of all types and sizes.