By Abid Usman
LAHORE: President Dr Arif Alvi on Thursday stressed the importance of information technology (IT) and artificial intelligence (AI) to meet future challenges facing the country and the world. Addressing the faculty members and students of the Virtual University (VU) here on Thursday, the president said he wished to introduce virtual education system across the country like the VU.
He said the world needed about 80 million IT, AI and cyber security (CS) experts per annum whereas Pakistan was just producing 27,000 IT experts, adding that the world was not meeting the demand of experts as the IT was being used in every field of life.
The president said Pakistan had great population of the youth and the world was looking towards it. “If we train our youth in IT, AI and CS then our youth can get jobs across the world,” he said and added that Islamic World alone was a big market for Pakistani trained youth.
Dr Alvi said the country had acknowledged the importance of IT only after the coronavirus, adding that: “We should give great importance to IT for development and progress of the country in future,” he added.
Dr Alvi said that hybrid training should be introduced in the country and stressed the VU staff to recognize their potential and follow exponential approach.
He expressed his satisfaction on the work of the university and appreciated the faculty.
Earlier, the president visited different parts, including computer labs, and various departments of the university.
He was also given briefing about procedure and working of the VU.
On the other hand, A free online puzzle game Wordle is the latest trend on Twitter where people share their daily scores in form of emoji charts.
Seems like President Arif Alvi has also joined the bandwagon and has now tried his hand at Wordle. The Head of State posted his score on the micro-blogging app on Thursday morning.
Awab Alvi, his son, quote tweeted the score chart to share that the President has always “enjoyed puzzles” and so it was only a matter of time before he “got hooked onto” it. It seems like the Alvi family has one too many fans of the online puzzle game.
Awab hinted at an inter-family Wordle competition in the place where three generations share scores daily — how fun!
Wordle, created by Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn-based programmer, asks users to guess a pre-determined hidden five-letter word within six guesses. If you do manage to guess the word, you’re rewarded with bliss of self-satisfaction for 24 hours and the cycle begins again.
Since there’s a new word every day, which stays the same for anyone playing anywhere in the world, there’s an extra level of competitiveness on a shared global level. The game picked up its pace when a share button was added for people to brag about their scores without revealing the word.