Bilal Zaka

I am an experienced IT professional, presently working as Head of IT Services at one of the largest IT degree awarding institutes in Pakistan i.e. COMSATS University Islamabad (formerly COMSATS Institute of Information Technology). Prior to my present position, I had the opportunity to work as teacher, researcher, software consultant, system/network administrator and policy maker at a number of reputed organizations. I contributed in a number of software development, network design, system implementation and cyber security auditing projects for national and international clients. I possess a rich combination of technical, research and management experience with an outstanding record of proactively initiating and establishing new projects. I see myself as an innovative, dedicated and results-oriented achiever with good interpersonal and organizational skills. I did my PhD (Doktor der technischen Wissenschaften) in Informatics from the Graz University of Technology – Austria, and my first professional degree is from Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad Pakistan, with majors in Electronics. In recent past, I headed the planning and development of a technology enabled education dissemination platform for COMSATS (Virtual Campus). It covers the policy making to launch online degree programs, development of technology infrastructure, student information system, learning management system, digital courseware, and a nationwide network of student support centers to facilitate the modern virtual education. As virtual campus in charge, I managed academic operations of the 12 offered degree programs with over 9 thousand students enrolled through online systems. The comprehensive working scheme of virtual campus also includes digital course content preparation, and over 300 courses are available online on public internet. Besides my regular services at COMSATS, I am also part of technical committee of Higher Education Commission of Pakistan and provide regular inputs in national level policies and projects. I am also collaborating with technology companies in Europe to develop and promote ICT tools for academic needs. I have had ample opportunities to work in diverse areas since I have remained a part of academia as well as the IT industry. I worked as team lead and member in many projects in Pakistan (COMSATS, HEC), USA (eletel Inc.), Austria (TUG, Bitmedia), Tajikistan (WorldBank Project) and TEIN*CC Korea. Data mining and knowledge management remained central to my research mission throughout the career. Our world is becoming more digitized and connected with every passing day. Use of interrelated and intelligent devices (IoT) producing massive information for human consumption have transformed this data into big data and it is critical that we find ways and means to transform the big data into knowledge, capable of innovative services, smart decision making and new business models. I investigated the integration of information retrieval and matching algorithms in human and machine context for optimized information delivery and improved performance of document comparison systems in academic settings. Being a technology services administrator in academic environments I also worked extensively on technology enabled teaching and learning environments. I had the opportunity of present my work at reputed international conferences and published in accredited peer reviewed journals. Besides the acceptances of my reports and research findings the systems developed under my supervision are used by a number of institutes. In my capacity as an academic technology expert I remained instrumental in educational and research network planning and development, system and network auditing and policy making at both national and international level. I have established active research and development collaborations within academia and also with industry. My research agenda for the near future will be focused on the use and utilization of various types of academic data for information discovery, management and presentation.