Pakistan grabbed three gold and six silver awards at the recently held Asia-Pacific ICT Awards 2016 –dubbed as the ‘Oscars of the ICT arena’ held in Taipei, Taiwan.

According to the Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA), which announced the winners, Pakistan finished fourth in the overall awards count, ahead of economic powerhouses such as Australia, China, Japan, Singapore and Thailand.

P@SHA, took a delegation of 41 people to Taipei where 28 Pakistani teams competed with 236 teams from 17 different countries across the Asia-Pacific region. ‘Team Pakistan’ included winners and runners up at the P@SHA ICT Awards 2016, held on October 14, 2016.

This year too, Team Pakistan’s performance was dominated by young people. NUST (National University of Science and Technology) College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering (EME) won a gold for their tertiary student project ‘Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) for Diagnosis of Movement Disorders’; a product that collects data samples from patient’s hand tremors and analyses it to support clinical decision-making.

The second gold was bagged by NUST College of EME which worked in collaboration with CASE (Centre for Advanced Studies in Engineering), AFIO (Association of Former Intelligence Officers) and Biomisa (a research group) for their Research and Development project ‘Analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography Image for CDSS.

The third gold went to WonderTree; a platform that helps special children develop physical, social, academic and life skills sets through their augmented reality games. WonderTree is a startup from P@SHA incubator TheNest I/O.

The silver-winners included, Amin Farid from Cedar College, who won for his project ‘Conversation Engineering and chatbots; Sheops, an online marketplace for women providing entrepreneurship opportunities to women; Trillium Information Security Systems for their product T-Eye Platform, MandiExpress that connects farmers directly to consumers; UBL Find Managers for ‘imPro’ and NUST for ‘Sionser’; a portable device with android application to measure accurate concentration of toxic contaminants in drinking water.

Commenting on the win, Jehan Ara, President, P@SHA said, “All credit goes to the hard work put in by the teams and efforts of mentors and judges who have been working with them all individually since October.”

She said P@SHA will continue in its endeavour to showcase the diverse talent of the ICT industry and pave way for them to compete and win against companies and products that are deemed the best in the region.

The Asia Pacific ICT Alliance (APICTA) Awards, is an international awards programme organised by APICTA; an alliance of national ICT organizations representing their respective economy to promote and develop ICT solutions and enhance innovation. The awards aim to enhance ICT awareness and bridge the global digital divide. Last year at the APICTA Awards, Pakistan won three golds and one silver.