Our Coordinator Iqbal Khan has been featured in a newspaper! Read the article below:

Mohammad Iqbal Khan is part of a vast army of researchers that has been pursuing the Holy Grail of the computer world: Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is the ability of man-made machines to duplicate intelligent behaviour, such as decision-making, planning and natural language. Computers and electronic devices can do amazing things these days, but critics of AI say that no actual comprehension by the AI computer has taken place, rendering the effort moot.

The Centennial College professor of Applied Information Sciences says that after 40 years of hard work, the ai community has stepped back a little to re-define their goal in more attain-able terms. "It’s now been de-fined as the ability to survive un-foreseen circumstances – it’s a test of evolution."

By way of example, he points to his high-tech office telephone, which is networked to function as an internet device.

"It only works in very narrow parameters. It has to have electricity, a network connection, even the right temperature. Take any of these things away and the telephone becomes useless. It can’t adapt."

On the other hand, a human being has a remarkable ability to acclimatize to a variety of circumstances. Self-preservation is imprinted in the brain, and the individual has the intelligence to seek shelter, warmth, shade, water – whatever is required to sustain life.

"Humans are really, really complex. You don’t realize just how awesome human design is until you try to duplicate it in a machine," says Khan.

The 55-year-old professor has seen and done a lot since his boyhood years growing up in Faisalabad, an industrial centre in the Punjab province of Pakistan. He attended the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, where he graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering.

His first job was for a European technology firm in Pakistan, where he was given a sales position. It quickly dawned on Khan that sales was not the best use of his skills and talents, and he with-drew from the company. He then worked for the local electrical power authority as an "electricity salesman".

"It was a politically expedient way to employ large numbers of recent engineering graduates coming out of Pakistan’s schools, but I couldn’t live with the corruption that I witnessed on a regular basis," recalls Khan. He left and took an engineering job in Iran, working on a new lead and zinc processing plant.

"I became fluent in Persian in a very short time, which made me popular at work," says Khan. It wasn’t long before he became chief electrical engineer, then assistant plant manager.

But the Iranian Revolution exploded in 1979, and Khan was pressured to stay and run the plant after all of the Europeans were expelled from the country. Conditions became untenable for Khan – his passport was confiscated, among other freedoms – and he once again began looking for an exit.

Fortunately he was able to convince the powers that be that he would benefit from further education by enrolling in a Master’s degree program at Queen Mary, University of London. He was given a one-year leave of absence to study in England.

"By the time I finished my Master’s, the Iran-Iraq war had broken out and I had no desire to go back, so I started my Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence," he remembers.

Khan put himself through school by working as a software developer. Five years later, he landed his first teaching job at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. He designed the Master’s program in Information Technology, which had become a hot new career destination.

"it was becoming big. Unemployed engineers, on the other hand, were a big issue that needed addressing. Converting tradi-tional engineers into it specialists was a solution that won a lot of support politically," says Khan.

In 1992 he married a woman from Toronto in a traditional ceremony back in his homeland. They returned to Scotland and had their first child a year later. But his wife disliked Glasgow’s grim, rainy weather and the young family relocated to South-hampton in the south of Eng-land, where he became a senior lecturer at Solent University. Not surprisingly, Artificial Intelligence formed a major part of his lectures and research.

When his wife’s mother became ill, they made the leap across the Atlantic and settled in Toronto, so that she could be close to her family.

Khan immediately began teaching computer programming part-time at Toronto’s colleges; first at Seneca, then Humber, and eventually at Centennial College, where he landed a permanent position after rewriting the curriculum for the College’s first four-year degree program.

Ontario’s colleges had been given the right to offer "applied" degrees for the first time in 2000, and Centennial was one of the first off the line with a unique program in Computer and Communication Networking. What made it different from university offerings in this field was its emphasis on business applications, as well as technology.

"Manufacturing in North America is destined to be out-sourced to China and India. So North American companies will be left to manage intellectual property. They will be responsible for ideas, and their future employees will have to know design, service and business principles."

"That’s exactly what is being taught in our program – and it is what employers want to see in our new graduates," says Khan.

The program has already borne fruit – the first class graduated in June – and Khan is delighted to report that everyone is already employed.

"We had 26 high-tech employers who took our co-op students for the past two summers, and I can tell you their feedback has been very, very positive!"

Centennial’s Networking program, and its sister degree program in Software Systems, benefit from state-of-the-art laboratories that have yet to be duplicated by another Ontario college or university.

"A few years ago, Centennial was the first college to have a voip lab in the province. Now, we’re the first to establish a wimax laboratory for use by our students," says Khan. "We teach the principles of networking through hands-on learning. At university, they’re still teaching it on a blackboard with a piece of chalk."

Khan is proud of everything he has accomplished at Centennial in the handful of years he has been teaching there, but acknowledges the struggle to find the resources for his college degree programs wasn’t easy.

As for furthering the science of Artificial Intelligence, it’s a labour of love that continues to occupy his mind – which, ironically, is a beautiful piece of engineering that may never be duplicated in silicon.

 
Source: http://www.e-desinews.com/whoeverthoughidbe.html