Sophomore students from LUMS place in top 5 entrants in MIT tech competition

Kudos to Hasanat and Farrukh, two sophomore students from the Lahore University of Management Sciences who have placed 5th in an MIT Design Contest that required entrants to design, code and document an electricity consumption monitor that uploads information to a central database. Since the competition was open to contestants from all over the world, this award is a huge honour for the young engineers, their school… and for Pakistan. The quality of our science and technology graduates is increasing by the day. LUMS and its new SSE (School of Science and Engineering) promise to yield several Newtons, Einsteins, Turings and Abd-ul-Salams! Stay tuned!

“The first entrants to the MIT Design Contest!”

As noted by MIT Professor Richard Larson, the Lahore University of Management and Science (LUMS) is viewed by many as the best private (non-governmental) university in Pakistan. These two students lived up to that reputation! Farrukh and Hasanat were the first of many contestants from around the world to submit their entry into the MIT Design Contest. They even surprised the judges by entering two days early!

The objective of the contest was to submit a design for a residential electricity monitoring device that could “read” the total electricity into a residential home and transmit (and store) that data to an MIT database.

As many contestants found out, this was a challenging device to design, but Farrukh and Hasanat placed in the top five entrants. They have received a certificate of excellence from MIT, as well as a small gift. The judges were extremely impressed with their submittal, which consisted of a complete design, including a detailed block diagram, controller code, service connection information, circuit diagrams, and an explanatory write up. This team set the bar high for the remaining contestants.

Farrukh is a sophomore at LUMS majoring in Computer Engineering. He is currently interested in mobile  communication, social networking, and RIAs in Flash. He would like to work for a “killer” start-up company after graduation. Hasanat is pursuing Computer Engineering from LUMS. His interests include open source development and mobile computing. He aspires to work in pervasive computing after graduation.

These students stay busy outside of school! They are currently creating a magical map of their University (similar to a “Harry Potter world” but using Bluetooth technology).  They also have ongoing and heated debates over OpenSource versus Microsoft platforms that will no doubt continue long into the future!

The MIT Design Contest was managed by MIT Engineering System Division (ESD) Ph.D. student, Kat Donnelly, with support from across the university, including (but not limited to): MIT Portugal Program (funding), MIT Media Lab (funding), ESD (Professor David Marks, Professor Richard Larson), MIT students (Dan Livengood, Manu Gupta, Rebecca Waber, Kevin Brokish, Tim Heidel, Woei Ling Leow ). We also had support from Duke University (funding, Professor Dan Ariely). In addition, MIT’s Bob Jaffe, John Kassakian, and Richard Larson serve as three of about 10 foreign members of the LUMS Advisory Board.