CLOUD COMPUTING:
Join us for the upcoming FAANA Webinar session titled: Cloud Computing. Description: Ever wondered why Cloud Computing is all the hype these days? What problem does it solve and how it can help you? What does Netflix, Pinterest, Lyft, AirBnB have in common? Join in to learn about :
Register Here This free, online Webinar is open to the public and will include a moderated conversation with additional questions submitted live from the online audience. Moderator: Ahmad Uzair Speaker Bio : Ata ul Haq is a graduate of FAST-NU '98 Islamabad. He has been in the IT industry for more than 18 years working with startups to Fortune 500 companies. He is currently a Senior Program Manager at Amazon, working for the Alexa Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language team. Before that, he worked with Amazon Web Services where he delivered solutions to Public Sector customers world-wide.
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Join us for the upcoming FAANA Webinar session titled: Higher Studies in United States. This is going to be a live panel discussion comprising of various FAST alumni discussing their journey to U.S. They would also be sharing tips and tricks that would help streamline the admission procedure for upcoming students.
This session is intended to help prospective students applying next year to put together a timeline for rest of their academic year. Don’t miss it! Learn About:
Tune in live at 12:00 PM (Noon) – 1:00 PM EDT (10pm-11pm Pakistan Standard Time) on Sunday, DECEMBER 15, 2019. Register Here This free, online discussion is open to the public and will include a moderated conversation with additional questions submitted live from the online audience. Moderator: Ahmad Uzair Panelist: Sameen Reza: Sameen Reza is an alumni of FAST Lahore, batch 1993. Sameen worked for a software engineering firm for a year after doing her BCS. She then went to Dubai for a couple of years and worked for a networking solution provider company. After going back to Pakistan, she worked for 4 years with Beaconhouse Informatics as deputy manager academics. In 2017, Sameen was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue PhD in Educational Communication and technology from New York University. She came to US in Aug 2018 and have completed three semesters to date. Her research interests are learning analytics and how technology can be used to improve educational processes and outcomes. Sameen’s special passion is to teach and make programming easier and interesting for students. Nouman Shafqat : Having graduated from FAST Lahore in 2015, Nouman joined CureMD healthcare where he initially started working in the quality department but soon transferred to the product team as an analyst. CureMD had an EMR product for US based physicians. As a member of the team that guided the product’s vision and strategy, he was responsible for research and development of new features and certifications. It was during his time at CureMD that Nouman realized the importance of data driven decision making and how the power of data can be leveraged in the healthcare industry to overcome its current problems and dependencies on humans. Nouman is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science with specialization in Data Science at Washington State University. Ahmad Malik: As Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Learning Care Group, Ahmad Malik leads all aspects of technological development supporting the company’s innovative educational programs and customer solutions. His background includes more than 20+ years of wide-ranging leadership experience across all aspects of IT. Previously, he spent 12 years with Ciber (now HTC Global) in senior IT roles of steadily increasing responsibility, most recently as Director of Application Services. Ahmad holds an MS Information Systems degree from Lawrence Technology University and an MBA from University of Colorado at Denver. Ahmad graduated from FAST Institute of Computer Science Lahore in 1994. Rameez Ahmad: Rameez is from Batch 2005, FAST Lahore campus. Currently residing in Michigan. We would like to give you an update on our progress for this fiscal year against our original target of 52k and share the numbers that many of you have requested. With only 2 months left to go, we have so far collected $22k which leaves us with the delta of $30k to meet our goal. Like previous years, we are counting on your generous contribution to reach our goal and keep providing the steady funding to the 5 campuses. We encourage you to consider sponsoring:
· One semester for a student by donating $1200 or $100/month · One year (two semesters) by donating $2400 or $200/month · One exhibition by donating $1200 or $100/month · Or any amount on a monthly recurring basis. You can make your tax deductible donations through our website www.faana.org or through your company’s donation match program. FAST Alumni Association of North America (FAANA) brings to you the 6th session from our webinar series. The upcoming session is going to talk about the video gaming industry and possible opportunities in this billion dollar industry. Please register on the link below. Registration HERE Please join us at the sixth FAANA webinar on Sunday, November 3rd at 12 pm Eastern Time (10 pm Pakistan Time). Our guest speaker is Mohsin Hasan, a graduate of FAST Islamabad, 98 batch. Overview: Video games is a $120 Billion industry. What started as a small success with Asteroids in 1979 has now expanded to countless billion dollar franchises. A typical AAA goes through several stages of development from game concept, Art Direction, Game Design, Production, Development and Testing. Although the video game industry is changing rapidly with console, mobile, cloud and subscription based gaming services, the core game development model is more or less the same. In this session, speaker will talk about his personal journey from FAST Islamabad to EA Canada and the process it took to ship some of the biggest gaming franchises. He will also talk about some of the roles and their responsibilities that are involved in shipping a successful AAA title. Speaker Bio: Mohsin Hasan is FAST alumni from Batch 98 Islamabad. A video game development expert with 16+ years experience shipping AAA game titles. Cofounded a game development studio in Pakistan and have since worked at Electronic Arts shipping some of the biggest video game franchise including Need For Speed, Fifa, Skate and Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare. Have experience working in various capacities in the industry ranging from software engineer, Producer, Development Director and Technical director. FAST Alumni Association of North America (FAANA) brings to you the 5th session from our webinar series. The upcoming session is going to cover the field of Medical Imaging and its practical applications. Please register on the link below. Registration HERE Please join us at the fifth FAANA webinar on Sunday, September 29th at 12 pm Eastern Time (9 pm Pakistan Time). Our guest speaker is Dr. Arish Qazi, a graduate of FAST Islamabad, 99 batch. Medical imaging has revolutionized clinical decision making. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and other imaging modalities have enabled clinicians to non-invasively and reliably visualize internal organs, and provide important information about the physiological and pathophysiological changes. This has led to early diagnosis and monitoring, thus enabling a significant improvement in therapeutic output. The increasing amount of medical devices has led to dramatic increases in size and complexity of imaging data. Therefore, computer-aided analysis and processing of medical images has emerged as a vital component of bio-medical research and clinical practice. This talk will give a brief introduction to the field of medical imaging, followed by examples of applications developed in both academic and industrial settings. About the speaker: Dr. Arish Qazi has more than 15 years of industry experience performing medical image analysis and processing research and development both at private companies, as well as in hospital settings. He has conducted pioneering algorithm development work primarily in the context of image registration and image segmentation, and has experience with novel image-guided systems. His experience includes working with different imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance (MR), computed tomography (CT), and cone-beam CT imaging and is credited as inventor/co-inventor of 11 granted patents, and has authored over 25 peer reviewed publications. Last year, FAANA community came together to raise funds to support many deserving students at Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, Peshawar and Faisalabad campuses by providing them financial aid. We were able to contribute $35k to the above campuses that had only been possible due to generous donations of the FAST Alumni residing in the US and Canada. We also collected and distributed $9k towards the innovation exhibitions supporting the students.
This year, we gave ourselves even higher challenge of $52k which is 24% increase from last year so we can support more students at the five campuses and engage in research and innovation activities such as sponsoring software exhibitions and providing mentorship to the young minds. We are almost at the half mark for 2019, we are expecting $15k to come in through recurring donations that you have generously set up. That leaves us with the delta of $37k to meet our target. Like previous years, we aim to accelerate meeting our goal with your help and contribution. We encourage you to consider sponsoring · One semester for a student by donating $1200 or $100/month · One year (two semesters) by donating $2400 or $200/month · One exhibition by donating $1200 or $100/month · Or any amount on a monthly recurring basis. You can make your tax deductible donations through our website www.faana.org or through your company’s donation match program. Thank you for your valuable support. Please remember no amount is small! Your donation makes a world of difference to someone’s future. FAANA WEBINAR SERIES: SESSION 04: Data Importance - Cyber Security Threats and career opportunities7/20/2019 FAST Alumni Association of North America (FAANA) brings to you the fourth session from the recently launched webinar series. The upcoming session is going to cover Data Importance - Cyber Security Threats and career opportunities Please register on the link below. Registration HERE Please join us at the fourth FAANA webinar on Sunday July 28th at 12 pm Eastern Time (9 pm Pakistan Time). Our guest speaker is Mr. Muhammad Rizwan, a graduate of FAST Lahore, 02 batch. The objective of this session is to encourage entrepreneurs and students to choose their careers in the field of Cyber Security. The speaker will be highlighting the data importance (how data can be converted in to money), which cyber security threats should we know and how attackers infect their targets. Muhammad Rizwan, 02 batch - FAST Lahore, is currently working at FireEye, Inc located in Silicon Valley (Bay Area, California). He has been working in cyber security field since 2006 (having 13+ years’ experience in Pakistan, Singapore and USA). Muhammad started his career as a QA analyst, then moved to R&D department and currently working with the Development teams. He has also filed for the following two patents,
https://patents.justia.com/patent/10284575 https://patents.justia.com/patent/10025927 Additionally Mr.Rizwan is also working on a startup in Pakistan, whose idea is around Education and Training for better earnings. He plans to launch it soon. FAST Alumni Association of North America (FAANA) brings to you the 3rd session from the recently launched webinar series. The upcoming session is going to cover Data Science Practical Applications in Retail Industry.Register on the link here. Please join us at the 3rd FAANA webinar on Sunday June 9th at 12 pm (noon) Eastern Time (9 pm Pakistan Time). Our guest speaker is Mr Hamza Farooq, a graduate of FAST Karachi, 2004 batch. Hamza currently based out of Sunnyvale, California, leads multiple data science teams at Walmart who are responsible for building machine learning & optimization products to provide recommendation in the assortment, replenishment and space domain at Walmart stores. He has over a decade of experience in the Data Science field and have helped build multiple machine learning algorithms to solve real world problems, deliver meaningful results and accomplish critical business objectives. The session will cover some of the concepts of data science on building next generation models for the Retail Sector, how to understand customer pattern and create a personalized store for local customers. This will be followed by an overview of the startup idea and how to utilize natural language processing to learn from large amounts of unstructured data Hamza is currently looking for skilled and passionate individuals from FAST to join his team to help transform the travel industry. This will be a paid internship for 2-3 months and will require people with experience in full stack engineering and penchant for discovering new algorithms in Machine Learning. (Further details to be given towards the end of the session)
You will also learn about how to build network using platforms available in the US and Pakistan. FAST-NU Alumni Association (FAANA) Webinar series: Session 02: Artificial Intelligence Please join us at the second FAANA webinar on Sunday May 5th at 12 pm Eastern Time (9 pm Pakistan Time). Our guest speaker is Mr Nauman Sheikh, a graduate of FAST Lahore, 92 batch. Register ( here ) Nauman Sheikh worked on an AI project very early in his career back in 1996 when he built a rule-based Pilot Scheduling system for Northwest Airlines. He has been building and deploying predictive models in operational environments since 2008 when he built and sold Credit Risk Models to banks in 3 continents. In 2013 he undertook a 10+ million device project dealing with IoT, billions of records and Real-Time operational decisions using predictive models. He first used Neural Networks in 2009 to solve a Money Laundering problem which built on his earlier project he had undertaken for US Treasury on Anti-Money Laundering back in 2002. He is a hands-on practitioner and has written a book on implementing AI that covers problem definition, model building, model deployment and overall business adoption of AI. His recent work is focused on Text Mining, Human Machine interface and gaming. In this session, Mr Nauman will be covering the following : - What is AI and what it is NOT – Demystify and clear the confusion and jargon - History of AI evolution – Tech Perspective from 80s to today - How it works – Supervised Vs. Unsupervised - Changing Trends impacting us – Overview of Gaming, Self-Driving, Robotics, Devices - Changing nature of business and opportunities for us - Overview of Tools/technologies - Q/A session toward the end of the session - Speaker can be further reached via email provided at the end of presentation You will also learn about how to build network using platforms available in the US and Pakistan. FAST Alumni Association, North America Chapter-FAANA recently conducted its elections for the year 2019-2020. This year the response had been overwhelming both from the candidates as well as the voters/participants. Election process was successfully completed with the help of one of the founding members of this organization and the final counting of votes was completed on January 18th, 2019. Out of eight nominations,. Five individual members with highest votes were elected to be part of FAANA board and to represent the organization. The elected board members are Ahmad Malik, Nauman Sheikh, Sheeba Malik, Jasim Qazi and Ahmad Uzair. Their brief background is listed at About us. The first board meeting for this year was held on January 27th, 2019 which was attended by all the new board members. There were a couple of subsequent board meetings to set the tone and direction for 2019. Some very exciting ideas were shared and discussed among the board members. The new board will be focused on the following areas for the upcoming year:
In 2018 the alumni generously donated about $36k which was 20% higher than $30k collected in 2017. All of the donation was used for financial aid of students in need. The financial target for the donation collection for the upcoming year is set to be approximately at $45k (increase of 25%). In the coming days, FAANA would be initiating a membership drive to involve maximum alumni in order to create a greater community space. For this purpose, we are starting a monthly webinar series that would include FAST alumni (who are mainly based in North America) as speakers so they can impart their knowledge and experience among the current FAST students and upcoming graduates. The topic list would range from highly technical and industry trending topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Learning, to some more personalized topic specifically focused in helping current student in pursuing higher studies in United States. This series would also cover the overall job market situation in US. This would be an excellent opportunity for the current and recent FAST graduates to come together and hear from industry veterans residing in US and learn from their experiences. There would also be an opportunity to get one-on-one mentorship and career guidance from the alumni. FAANA’s mission is to support FAST-NU in its mission through its alumni and provide a platform to council and support graduates For the last several years we have been supporting deserving students via financial aid program. Going forward, we are expecting to invest more in to the areas of Research & Development and promoting innovations across various FAST campuses. This year, FAANA sponsored $1500 each for annual exhibitions at local campuses: SOFTEC (FAST - Lahore), NUTEC (FAST - Peshawar) , DAIRA (FAST Faisalabad-Chiniot) 2019 and NASCON (FAST – Islamabad). We are having discussion to setup an incubation center at FAST Karachi. As a part of sponsorship, alumni can judge the innovation competitions, attend opening and closing ceremonies, deliver talks on behalf of FAANA and represent the organization. If you have any suggestion, please feel free to reach out to us via board@faana.org or https://www.facebook.com/FastAlumniNA/ Please subscribe to one of our digital channels listed here http://www.faana.org/resources.html Please join our WhatsApp group here: https://chat.whatsapp.com/9gZMdQQRaPVDHe6jtrq0YR |
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