Tahir is a Ph.D. candidate focused on investigating ICT for Development, particularly ICT in Education; he is a graduate of dual honors degrees in computer science and information technology. He is two times Google Sumer of Code Student. He has evaluation experience of different programming languages, platforms, and tech stack.
He has worked on a different proof of concepts, prototypes, pilot projects, and case studies. He is passionate about the use of information, communication, and mobile technologies for development, such as education, health, e-governance, empowerment, and agriculture.
He loves entrepreneurship and startup ventures; he is always looking to work for new ideas, innovations, and inventions in diverse capacities, from strategic planning to tactical implementations. He welcomes any academic and industrial collaboration to contribute to a positive impact and make meaning for the masses.
Coming from a family with an unfortunate financial situation, Tahir has been working since his childhood. He has had many different types of work experiences, including working as an office boy, laborer, electrician, and supporting staff and tutor as well as spending time as a volunteer. He left his kindergarten school after passing level 02 in 1999, going on to work with his father in a college canteen in 2002 as a support-worker. In 2003 he left that college canteen and started another. Where the principal of the college offered him free education; the college classes were 03 years higher than his current educational level. That principal left the college within a year, so Tahir finalized his study after passing level 06. In 2006, he was admitted as a private/non-regular candidate in the examination of level 09 and 10 and passed. After that, he worked in varying capacities in different places as he needed to leave often to make time for his studies and exams. He gained a one-year vocational Electrical Certificate in 2007 and a one-year vocational Electrician Certificate in 2008. He passed levels 11 and 12 in 2009 as a private/non-regular student while working with lawyers as part of their support staff. He then gained admission to an e-learning and distance university, the Virtual University of Pakistan, where he graduated with dual bachelor degrees in BSIT and BSCS. He studied MSCS and worked on his research project “Teaching of Mathematics using IT”; the theme of the project is “Future Technologies in E-learning and Distance Education.” Tahir is a two times Google Summer of Code student. GSOC is a prestigious program for the best student programmers across the world, where participating mentoring organizations select a few top proposals out of thousands. He developed refunds and partial payments extension and APIs for CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a constituency relationship management used by many large NGOs, including Amnesty International, Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, CERN, and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. He implemented Apache HTTPD connector for libModSec (aka ModSec v3). ModSecurity is an open-source web application firewall, a toolkit for real-time web application monitoring, logging, and access control. He was Android Students Club Facilitator and Organizer in 2015, where he was required to teach and train club members about mobile application development; Google-funded ASC and they selected just a few proposals to launch and run this community. The use of information communication and mobile technologies for development is his core research interest, particularly the use of ICT for the education of kindergarten children who are not in school as well as within the agricultural sector where farmers are under-privileged and living below the poverty line. He aims to empower them and to provide real meaning and practical use for ICT amongst people where it has had no positive or productive use until now. His focus is on localized and context-aware human-computer interaction as per sociological, psychological, and pedagogical aspects. His future goal is to dedicate himself to teaching and the education of oppressed children, women, and farmers. He believes in creating the two-subject curriculum; literacy (local language, the national language, and foreign language) and mathematics (problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning) because they have less time and resources to get involved in more courses. Their education needs to be blended using technology, e-learning, and distance education. He believes that sustainable development is dependent on education and growing awareness between children, women, and farmers. He loves teaching, training, collaboration, volunteer, research, and development opportunities. He thinks problems are possibilities to make new meaning for the future, and today is the future. He is an advocate of human rights, the economics of education, the industry of knowledge, and open-source paradigm; feel free to ping him if something which lies within.
Tahir Ramzan 