If you believe in yourself and work hard enough nothing is
impossible!
Dr. Mustansar Ali Ghazanfar is a young
researcher in the field software and IT (machine learning and data mining). He
is an inspirational example for young Pakistani students living in remote
villages having poor schooling and background.
His
primary education is from a remote area of Sialkot (Govt. primary school Zafarwal,
Narowal), where the schools do not even have basic facilities; such as
buildings, furniture, fans, pure water, white/black board, toilets, etc. He
with his fellows used to sit on mat (a thick hard cover that is used to store goods for
transport) rather than chairs regardless of the weathering
conditions. Sometimes, the only shelter they had was trees during
bad weathering, that provide cooling during summer and their small branches
served as lights and heating source. Furthermore, the teaching standards were really poor—the course was
in Urdu, the teachers got no formal training (such as communication skills,
art of teaching, etc.), and even worse the teachers used to keep their students
busy in their own home chores. After securing top in his school repeatedly, he
got admitted to Govt. High school Zafarwal, Narowal, where the conditions of
teaching were again not satisfactory (if not worse). He passed his schooling
while securing highest marks among his cohort from
6th to 10th grades.
At the age of 16, having no vision, he
was worried about his further education, and luckily his elder brother, who was
a student at Rawalpindi Medical College, suggested him to apply for FG Sir Syed
College Rawalpindi, one of the prestigious colleges in Federal board. He
applied for admission at this college, and the college readily accepted his
admission seeing his credentials. “Those were the toughest days of my life”,
he recalls. I have to cycle more than 10 km everyday to college in the morning
then to a tuition center in the afternoon regardless of the weather conditions. Due to some time crisis, at times, I don't have enough time to eat my lunch; however, this served as a source of massive inspiration. Furthermore, as there was a sudden transition of medium of teaching from Urdu
to English, I had to work extra hard (sometimes working more than 15 hours a
day) to compete with my fellow students, who got excellent schooling background,
e.g. beaconhouse, Roots,
etc compared with mine (coming from Urdu medium school from a remote village).
I worked hard and I was among top 1% students of my college during 1999-2001.
After his FSC, he was offered admissions
(straight at open merit) in UET-Lahore and Taxila in Electrical Engineering; however, he chose Software engineering knowing its future growth. He
repeatedly secured first position and got scholarship (department topper's scholarship) during his BSc Engineering at UET-Taxila. He got gold medal from UET-Taxila software engineering department for securing highest (90%) grades in
the department in 2006. He also got massive cash prize from Chairman Nescom, Dr Samar Mubarik, for his achievements.
After his graduation, he served at ministry
of defence as Assistant Manager for a short while where he got opportunity to
work on the software part of Pak-Sat IR
(the Pakistan first ever indigenous satellite). He got a chance to have
informal discussion with Dr. Riaz Suddle (Director Suparco Lahore) about
satellite communication.
He was awarded with full scholarship for
his higher studies in fall 2007 from HEC, Pakistan. He was admitted by
Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) department of University of Southampton, which
one of the best ECS departments in UK (among top 3 department in electronics and
computer science according to Guardian University Guide and Southampton university is
ranked in the top 51-100 universities for Computer Science consistently in the
QS World Rankings) having deep collaboration with MIT USA. He got opportunity to
have discussions with reputed faculty members of Southampton, e.g. sir Tim Berners-Lee
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee), the inventor of the World Wide
Web (WWW). He worked under the supervision of Prof. Nick Jennings (One of the best researchers in Europe in Artificial
Intelligence having h-index of 97 (the second top
non-American according to Palsberg)). His MSc
dissertation got highest grades among his class and got published in a
well-known conference.
He was awarded with PhD
scholarship from University of Southampton in fall 2008 and he worked on
Instant Knowledge project, a research project funded by Vodafone, aiming at
providing personalized recommendation to mobile users. During his PhD, he
published more than 10 international journals and conference papers. One of his
journal paper (published in Information Sciences) is among top journals of the
world (impact factor > 3). One of his papers was granted with best student
paper award in Rome, Italy in 2011. He has presented his work across whole
Europe, Eastern countries, and USA (twice). He passed his PhD viva at the age of 27 from University of
Southampton, UK. During his PhD, he also worked at Brandwatch, a multinational
firm working on data mining and machine learning where he improved their
language detection framework by 10% (accuracy improvement). He served as a
mentor for MSc Engineering students during his stay at University of
Southampton providing them career counseling, providing advice for home
sickness to international students, and assisting in their daily business.
He was approached by various
Web giants such as, Microsoft, Google, and other multinational companies worldwide;
however, he preferred to serve Pakistan’s inchoate software industry. He is
currently serving as an Assistant
Professor at UET-Taxila where he is supervising various MSc and BSc
Engineering students. He is an active blogger (http://musiali.blogspot.com/) and
regularly writes for newspaper. He also served at British Red cross during his
stay in United Kingdom as a Volunteer. He is an active sports person, playing
all sort of games, including long tennis, cricket, soccer, swimming, running,
and Gym. His detailed professional
profile can be found at uk.linkedin.com/pub/dr-mustansar-ali-ghazanfar/4/a00/501
.
ACHIEVEMENTS:
·
Best Student Paper
award in IADIS European conference on data mining, July 2011, Italy
·
Got PhD studentship
from MobileVCE (www.mobilevce.com)
·
Top in Software Deptt.,University of Southampton, 2007/08 session.
·
MSc Dissertation (proposing a
solution for collation formation among multi-agent systems) got heights grades
in the department.
·
Gold Medalist of UET-Taxila in Software Deptt. (Overall 4 yr top)
·
Achieved scholarships repeatedly from UET Taxila (topper scholarship).
·
Achieved grand cash prize from Chairman NESCOM (Dr. Samar Mubarik) Pakistan, Apr.
2007
AREAS OF INTEREST:
·
Data Mining and Machine Learning: Recommender Systems,
Collaborative Filtering, Information Retrieval, Kernel based learning,
Classification techniques, Dimensionality reduction techniques for handling
large scale data, Clustering, Google Page Rank,
·
Forecasting, Personalization, Prediction
·
Quantitative Analysis, Quant
research and development, Hedge fund
·
Software Development, Object
Oriented Programming
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