Sarmad Hussain

Dr. Samad Hussain is a Professor of Computer Science and the Head of the Center for Language Engineering at Pakistan's University of Engineering and Technology. His participation at ICANN involves his membership with the SSAC and his participation on the Whois review team.

Country:	Pakistan

Dr. Hussain was presented with the Dr. M. N. Azam prize for Computer Science by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences in 2002.

Specialization

His area of expertise includes Speech and Natural Language Processing with special reference to Urdu, Speech Acoustics, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Font Development.. Dr. Hussain has been leading a 30 person development team working on Urdu Machine Translation, and text-to-speech and lexicon systems through a project funded by Pakistan's E-Government Directorate. He is also aiding with Microsoft's projects on Urdu Spell-Checkers and Urdu Terminology Translation.

Dr. Sarmad Hussain has also worked with the National Committee for the Standardization of Pakistani Languages for Computing, and was responsible for the proposal which enabled complete Urdu support in Unicode. He has also worked more generally on the standardization of bidirectional languages for Unicode. He heads the Character Set and Collation Sequence Standardization Sub-Committee, and is currently working on the standardization of Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi, and Sindhi languages.

Education

• Ph.D, Linguistics, Northwestern University, 1997
• M.Phil, Computer Speech/Language Processing, Cambridge University, 1993
• B.Sc., Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, 1992