Blog & News

The world just witnessed another successful ICT event in Bangladesh that is ‘Digital World 2016’. The event has been organized for the 4th times with the presence of thousands of visitors from all walks of life. The event's slogan #NonstopBangladesh has created a buzz among the country people that led them to be a part of the country’s biggest ICT expo.

Honorable Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina officially inaugurated the event on 19^th October at the International Convention City, Basundhara. 100 ICT experts and investors, 43 world famous speakers and thousands of people visited the mega ICT event.

The 3 day event was resounded with visitors from all walks of life. Students, professionals, freelancers, entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers made the premise joyful and festive. The ICT division of Bangladesh organized this expo with the help of Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services (BASIS) and Access 2 Information (A2i).

An interactive session has a strong interconnection with the participants’ performance readiness that can enable them to be cheerful leading to an intrinsic thirst to learn. The room 206 of the United International University (UIU) was the reflection of such touch off interaction between the participants and the workshop facilitator. Around 60 participants from all over Bangladesh took part in the previously announced workshop on ‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) on 22^nd October 2016 conducted by Dr. Ehsanul Hoque, assistant professor of Rochester University. The facilitator has recently been enlisted as "35 under 35" by MIT.

The participants were from a very diverse group of people, including students with different study background, university faculties, bankers, freelancers and researchers. This multi-professionals' presence has proven their interest to accept AI as a new challenge in their career.

The main perspective of the workshop was to explore and discuss the possible scopes and opportunities of AI in Bangladesh. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and AI were the principle coverage of today’s workshop. Mr. Hoque could stimulate the participants successfully that was manifested by their active participation throughout the session. They came up with some very interesting ideas of how AI can be utilized in real life from Bangladeshi perspective. For example, some expressed using AI to teach the importance of body language in language learning while another shared using it to improve the accent of Bangla for the radio jockey.

BdOSN in collaboration with United International University is organizing a introductory workshop on artifcial inteligence. The workshop will cover the various tools and practices required to explore the exciting world of AI and deep learning. The workshop will be facilitated by Dr Ehsan Hoque of Rochester University who has recently been listed in the "35 under 35" by MIT.
Those who are interested in exploring the world of AI con join the workshop.

The workshop will be held in the United International University, Road 8A, Satmasjid Road Dhaka and will he held from 10 am to 1 pm. The registration fee is Taka 200. 

Interested people are requested to express their interest at https://goo.gl/forms/FngHWrwQf84meCjI3

If the no is more than the capacity, than a selection process will be done and succesfull candidates will be notified accordingly.

This year's PyCon Dhaka, the largest Python meet-up of the year took place at the auditorium of Bangladesh Computer Council(BCC) on 15th October, Saturday. The day-long event provided an amazing platform for like-minded individual to come together and share their experience and knowledge. Overall more than 300 people attended the event and over 500 people attended the live stream to learn from the Python experts in the community. The event was inaugurated by the  the Honourable State Minister of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, MP. In his inaugural speech he requested the developers community to work to solve the problems of the country.  The conference was also addressed by the executive director of  Bangladesh Computer Council SM Ashraful Islam.

The conference has been addressed by the following speakers :

1. Arifin Ibne Matin - Real-Time Django with Channels
2. Aniruddha Adhikary - Web scraping 101: Why, how and how not to Crawl
3. Gorky Sakhawat Sobhan - Yielding Tornado with Motor when you are stuck
4. A K M Zahiduzzaman - Spark your job with pySpark
5. Wasi Mohammed Abdullah - Python Profiling
6. Abu Ashraf Masnun - Python for the REST of Us!
7. Ashfaque Siddiqui - Introduction to Data Science
8. Mafinar Khan - Python for the REST of Us!

The biggest PyThon developers conference was organized by the python community of bangladesh with the support from Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN), Let's Learn Coding and Python Bangladesh.  NewsCred Dhaka and Dohatech funded the conference as Platinum and Gold Sponsor respectfully.

An online programming contest to mark the celebration of Ada Lovelace Day was held on 12th October 2016. Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM. Founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, it is now held every year on the second Tuesday of October. This year the day was celebrated on 11th October.

To celebrate the day, BdOSN organized an online programming contest for the girls. The contest was held in the online judging platform Codemarshal. The contest was participated by 256 participants. Although the contest was intended only for the girls but few boys also participated in the contest. Out of 256 participants 167 solved atleast 1 problem where as top 13 girls solved all six problems. The problem sets used in the contest were developed in the mentors camp held recently. 

14 selected mentors (both male & female) from different parts of the country had just enjoyed a 3 day residential camp in Dhaka held from 8-10 October 2016 organized by Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdSON).

The young participants attended different sessions in this duration covering some core sessions on programming, basic sessions on how to conduct the programming lesson, motivational sessions run by different renowned personnel and some other relevant workshops.

Keeping the Missingdaughter’s officially starting from very soon across the country, Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdSON) has arranged this residential camp to boost the future mentors and encourage them to lead the local girls programming camps in their own localities. To mention, Missingdaughter is an initiative of BdSON that aims to increase girl’s participations and involvement in the field of Science and Technology and different similar activities arranged nationally and internationally.

Therefore, the aim of this residential camp is to create a strong mentor group who will in turn conduct the workshop among the target groups in the Missingdaughter program. The mentors will be acting as ambassadors who will conduct the programming camps and inspire the deserving girls to join the ICT sectors and take part in various events and competitions.

Under the Missingdaughter program, 2 types of the camps will be organized.

1. Grace Hopper Girls Camp for Programming Contest

2. Ada Lovelace Programming Camps for the girls

However, the mentoring sessions under the Misingdaugter will be recorded that will be used later as a referral sample of programming lesson. The video will also be shared and circulated in different platforms

The camp was successfully conducted by Dr Nova Ahmed, associate professor of NSU; Mr Tahmid Rafi, CEO of Dimic Computing School Mr Tarif Ezaz , Mr All Rabbi and Mr Mosaref Hossain, Naveed Mahbub, engineer and comedian; and Dr. Muhit Kamal, associate professor, department of psychiatry (Mental Health) NIMHANS.

The mentors were awarded with certificates on 10th morning. The renowned author, physicist and professor Dr. Muhammed Zafar Iqbal and computer scientist, educator, author, and columnist Dr.M. Kaykobad were present in the closing days and motivated the participants.

'Girls are doing great in all public examinations in the country, but unfortunately they are not visible much in the working space, especially in the field of ICT. However, attempt like organizing girls programming camp in different parts of the country will change the situation in coming days." These are the hopes we noticed recently held "Grace Hopper Girls camp for Programming Contest" held in three district of the country. The Dhaka camp was held from 28-30th August while Dinajpur and Mohespur camps were held 6-8 and 7-9 September respectfully. A total of 89 girls from high school and early years of university joined camp to improve their programming skill. Bangladesh Open Source Network (BdOSN) in association with University of Asia pacific, Dinajpur IT Solutionsa nd Mohespur Junior Coders organized the camps.

One of the news paper wrote, "Nafiza Islam kalpo is a six grade student of Netrokona Govt. high school. In some ways she is far advanced than other girls of her age. When her fellow students use computer just for surfing websites in online, she thought of how to create those websites. She started learning programming from her mother and now she knows C and C++ programme within one year.
Mahfuza Homaira, Student of CSE in BRAC University is learning programming since 2014. She has created a mobile app by using her experience.
They are two participants of 30 girls who attended in girls’ programming camp held recently at University of Asia Pacific. All the participants are studying in different institution from Schools to University.
Bristy Shikder, Student of Massachusetts Institute of Technology leaded this training camp as trainer. She taught the participants about basic rules of programming and problem solving. Trainers gave them problems for solving. If they faced problem, trainer helped them solve it.

Rifat Ara Proma, CSE student from MIST says about this camp, “We are living in the era of ICT. Everyone prefers working by using internet. So, there is no alternative to programming. Programming is essential for male-female. I like programming. I have attended this camp to learn more programming.”
Two trainers trained this camp. They are Bristy Shikder from MIT and Rezwan Mahmud Tonmoy from Dhaka University. Tonmoy says, “We have taught them about Dynamic programming, Graph, Data Structure, mathematics and Geometry.”
Bangladesh progressed considerably in creating skilled programmers but there are hardly any female programmers. Bristy Shikder says, “Success in any field is not comprehensive without active participation of whole section of people. Many girls are interested in learning programming. This camp offered a helping hand to some of them to excel in this sector.” (http://www.daily-sun.com/printversion/details/164561/Girls%E2%80%99-programming-camp-held).

The camp will continue to be held and a total of 15 camps would be organized in coming days, informed bdOSN

A half day workshop on the "Unlock the Potential of Big Data" held on 24^th June, 2016 at the University of Asia Pacific Dhaka.  The workshop  discussed the Big Data market, the skill requirement to be in Big Data marketplace, where can one learn more about it, what are the use cases, and how to go about it. Around 50 participants participated in this workshop. Mr Mahdee Uz Zaman of virtu stream inc, conducted the session while Mr Munir Hasan of BdOSN welcome the participants and Asso. Prof Khan Md Anwarus Salam of UAP express the vote of thanks at the end of the workshop.

Mr Mahdee Uz Zaman explain in details the various aspects of Big data and gave emphasis that to be a big data expert it is very important to be extremely Open Minded with the innovation mindset.  He also discussed some tools and technology as well as few reference architectures. At the end of the workshop a discussion on how to build innovative solution using Big Data has also been held.

This workshop started the series activities on Big data planned by BdOSN and other organizations. There will be more workshop and seminar after the Eid.

Hasin Hyder, the re-known programmer, software architech, photographer and the entreprenuer, shared his journey towards excellnce with the hundreds of young people. He ask the new generaion to stick to one's idea till it succeded and suggested them to enjoy the life, in full aspect. He was talking in the the BdOSN Talk-4 organazised by Bangladesh Open Source Network and held in Bisso Sahitya Kendra on 7th May afternoon. The three hours session was mesmarized by Hasin's wonderful, witty and fluent presentation.

Hasin remebered differently able her mother's contribution towards his journey. Despite his study in Civil Engineering, he took the path of Programming of his own and excel with the persevarance and hard work. He said that he took this path as he loves programming and urges the young to take the path he/she loves. Hasin also answered different questions from the audiances.

The talk was sponsored by Hello academy, Adarsa Prokason and ET calling while Zero Degree Communication help the with the event management.