IEEE Women In Engineering (WIE) International Summit 2017 – Islamabad

IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Islamabad Section, one of the affinity groups of IEEE Region 10, held its first International Leadership Summit (ILS) on 7^th October 2017 at Bahria University Islamabad. The event successfully proceeded under the chairmanship of Ms. Mehak Saeed (GS WIE Islamabad Section) and Mr. Mujtaba Anwaar Chaudhary (Zonal Student Coordinator, IEEE R10 SAC) in collaboration with Mr. Faheem Haroon (Branch Counselor, IEEE BUIC SB) and Ms. Madiha Zohaib (WIE Counselor, IEEE WIE BUIC AG).

The summit with a theme With the theme ‘Together We Can Make Each Other Great’, focused on multiple tracks covering various facets of leadership and development primarily Women

Empowerment and Emerging Technologies. Moreover, the summit aimed to encourage, engross, empower and support women entrepreneurship.

The aim of the summit was to provide a platform to exchange the innovative practices and skill development towards startup initiation and business development.

The summit sessions were followed as:

1.Ice breaking session:

Starting with an ice-breaking session, the summit opened with different interactive activities and competitions and top three participants were awarded different prizes.

2.Emerging Technologies:

The summit gathered the attention of the audience with the session of first speaker Dr. Nadia Zaheer, Senior Management Consultant – Team Lead HWSW Analytics and Cognition and a data scientist. Her focus was introduction to Data Science and IBM Watson for start-ups. Moreover, she also highlighted one of the hot topics of today’s technological innovation i.e. making robots to learn cognitive process so that they may act and feel as human beings.

3.Startup competition

The next session was followed by a Startup competition in which woman led startups from all over Pakistan applied to pitch their idea to IBM. The panel of judges consisted of Komal Yousf, (Senior Business Consultant at IBM), Qaim Hassan Abbas(Data Scientist, Bluemix-Watson Expert at IBM) and Sakina Fatima (Cloud Developer Advocate at IBM ). The competition consisted of 120 seconds idea pitch followed by question and answers session from the judges.The shortlisted presented their ideas for evaluation.The top three winning startups from the competition were Awaaz, Pharmacon and muhallafeed.

4.Dis-ability

The next speaker was Miss Asna Javed who is a true inspiration for all strugglers out there. She refuses to add “Dis” to her “Ability” and today she is proud IBMer. She tied to encourage participants through her own example that if with her disability, she can excel in her field then anyone can.

The second part of summit started with the session of Mrs. Riffat Qureshi, General Manager (Training) WAPDA. She has been indulged in studies regarding Iqbal’s concept of Khudi (self- awareness) and tried to make participants to believe in themselves with any work they do. Parallel to this, held a session of Miss Shabana Khawar, Principal Country Officer, IFC-World Bank. She guided participants in the fields of management which may help them in setting up their business.

The third part included the session of Miss Ayesha Mubashir and Miss Sihah Waris. Ayesha introduced participants about a dedicated wing of PITB named “Herself” which aims to make women, with some start up idea, skilful including soft skills and technical skills as well. On the other hand,  Sihah, as the founder of ‘RiseMoms’ focused on technology helping working women to chase their dreams.

The fourth session started with sharing the valuable insights in the arena of design thinking and user experience by Aneeqa Ishaq, CDO IDEATE, and a Stanford graduate. Focusing on ‘Going Beyond the Boundaries of Technology’, She explained participants about the essential design concepts to be kept in mind that she has learnt from her journey in launching her start-up and successfully taking it forward. The other part of session was lecture of Miss Youmna El Bitar. She shared her experience about working as Radio Planning and Optimization (RNPO) Engineer with Zain Lebanon (also known as “touch”).

The last part of Summit started with session with Miss Bharti Ochani who is a firm believer of women empowerment. She shared her professional life and its difficulties with the participants and how she could overcome all those problems i.e. by believing in herself. The last session was with Miss Mehwish Zahoor where she summed up her experience of 9 years working with IEEE. Starting her journey from city of Faisalabad she enjoyed her position of first ever female Region 10 Student Representative at IEEE.

Upto 200 Students, Entrepreneurs and Professionals from all over the country participated in the summit and showed their support to emerging technologies, women entrepreneurship and leadership. 10 brilliant speakers from various fields attended the summit so that participants may have the flavor of all kinds of subjects which may help them in launching their start-ups and youth empowerment. All the participants were issued with the certificates for taking part in the International Leadership Summit (ILS).

Author: john.benedict

Hardware Engineer | Amazon