Technology Incubation Centre KICS (TICK) UET Lahore in collaboration with U.S Consulate organized a workshop titled “Startup founder workshop on how to build successful teams and businesses” (21st Century Job trends and an Introduction to Agile). Ms. Eileen Brewer and Ms. Cathy Simpson were the invited speakers of the workshop. Eileen Brewer has a Bachelor’s in Information Technology and 20 years of experience working in Silicon Valley tech companies. She has helped develop and deliver to market over 100 enterprise software and hardware products. Ms. Brewer is also an Angel Investor in Silicon Valley, where she has listened to hundreds of pitches and mentors founders. Her focus is on training founders and running STEM workshops for students. Cathy Simpson is a certified scrum trainer and agile coach, with a passion for transforming the world of work to be more productive, creative and fun. Cathy combines a warm energetic style with insights learned in the trenches at companies ranging from large financial institutions to small start-ups. Both speakers talked about the needs and importance of startup business, how to build successful teams and businesses, Job trends in the 21st century and Introduction to Agile. A large number of students and faculty members attended the seminar and appreciated the efforts of management for arranging the workshop to highlight the importance of startup business in this modern era.

Centre for Language Engineering (CLE) KICS UET Lahore in collaboration with Society for Natural Language Processing (SNLP) organized a three-day Conference on Language and Technology (CLT) 2020. It was a 7th in a series of biennial CLT conferences. The purpose of the conference was to bring together students, researchers and practitioners to exchange research and development in the fields of linguistics, speech, script and language processing. It was a joint effort to promote the area of research, educate the masses and the decision-making authorities to realize the importance of language and technology in the modern age.

The Opening ceremony of the 7th International Conference on Language & Technology (CLT) 2020 was held in University of Engineering and Technology Lahore. Dr. Sarmad Hussain, Head Centre for Language Engineering (CLE) welcomed the guests and participants and talked about the importance of Language & Technology. Whereas Director KICS, Prof. Dr. Waqar Mahmood gave a presentation to the audience about the introduction of KICS and research projects happening there. The three-day conference consisted of technical workshops, keynote talks, paper presentations, posters & demo display and panel discussion.

Both National and International speakers delivered their technical talks apart from the paper presentations. Invited speakers for talks from inside and across the border were from Muhammad Ali Jinnah University (MAJU), Isra University Hyderabad, University of Konstanz, Germany, Cambridge University, University of Edinburgh and Qatar Computing Research Institute QCRI. 10 accepted papers and 4 poster presentations were also presented at the conference by the authors from various institutes.

Panel discussion session on the topic “NLP Research in Pakistan: Building Synergies and Collaborations” was moderated by Dr. Sarmad Hussain and the panelists were Dr. Mariam Butt, Prof. Mark Gales, Dr. Tafseer Ahmed Khan, Dr. Hassan Sajjad and Dr. Tania Habib. The closing ceremony took place on the last day of the conference where all the guests and participants were awarded shields and certificates.

Students from the Department of Computer Engineering, University of Lahore visited Al Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science (KICS) UET Lahore. Manager Trainings, Mr. Kashif Bashir welcomed the students and briefed them about trainings & certifications happening at KICS.

Director KICS, Prof. Dr. Waqar Mahmood described them about the working of KICS and research projects happening at KICS. Moreover, Mr. Ghazanfar from Sultan Qaboos IT Lab gave a presentation on the topic “IOT Security” and Mr. Hafiz Tayyab Hashmi from HUTIC (Huawei UET Joint Telecom IT Centre) presented about “IP core in 5G Network”. After the theoretical session students visited different labs of KICS where they observed the researchers working on various projects.