Pakistan wins big at APICTA 2016

Nation bags three gold, six silver awards

Pakistan won big at the 2016 Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards (APICTA).

Leading the way were students from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), who won gold for their project Clinical Decision Support System for Diagnosis of Movement Disorders. Another group, also from NUST, won gold for their Analysis of Optical Coherence Tomography Image for CDSS research and Development project. Wondertree, a startup from P@SHA’s Tech Incubator The Nest i/o also won a gold.

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The Silver awards were bagged by Amin Farid for his chatbot school project on Conversation Engineering and Mr Higgins, NUST for their project Sionser, UBL Fund Managers for their financial product imPro, Trillium Information Systems for their Security product T-Eye and two startups of The Nest i/o - MandiExpress and Sheops.



It is also worth mentioning that Pakistan ranked fourth in overall award count, beating economic powerhouses like Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Japan and China.

APICTA is an annual award ceremony held to create ICT awareness in communities and provide networking and product benchmarking opportunities to ICT innovators and entrepreneurs. Now in its 16th year, the programme also promotes economic and trade relations, facilitates technology transfer, and offers business opportunities and exposure to venture capitalists and investors.

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Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ITES (P@SHA) took a delegation of 41 people to the award ceremony this year. The four-day event is akin to the Oscars for the Asia Pacific ICT community. A total of 28 teams from Pakistan competed against 236 from 17 economies across the region. The competition was judged by over 60 seasoned professionals. Judges from Pakistan included Jawwad A Farid, Badar Khushnood, Dr Shoab Khan, Sultan Hamdani and Jehan Ara.



Speaking on the occasion, P@SHA president Jehan Ara said, “P@SHA showcases the true potential and diverse talent of the ICT industry time and again by providing them a platform allowing them to compete and win against companies and products deemed the best in the region. All credit goes to the hard work put in by these teams and the efforts of mentors and judges who have been working with them since October.”