The Department of Telecommunications Engineering at NED University of Engineering and Technology in Karachi is set to host a session addressing one of the more pressing questions surrounding emerging technology, namely how trust can be built in an increasingly artificial intelligence driven world. The session, organised under the department’s TE Links CounselHour initiative, is scheduled for Tuesday, August 18, and will be held at Ashraf Habibullah Hall on the university’s Karachi campus between 2 PM and 4 PM.
The session will feature Taha Sajid, Principal Security Architect at EchoStar Corporation in the United States and founder of Xecurity Pulse, as the guest speaker. Sajid brings roughly two decades of experience spanning engineering and global standards leadership, having contributed to telecom standards work at organisations including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the GSM Association and the Third Generation Partnership Project. His professional trajectory, moving from hands on engineering roles into positions shaping international technical standards, is expected to form a central part of the discussion, alongside his more recent focus on questions of trust and security within artificial intelligence systems.
According to the session’s organisers, Sajid plans to share three lessons drawn from his career that he considers central to long term professional growth in technical fields. These include the argument that deep expertise in a specific area tends to prove more valuable over time than broad but shallow involvement across many areas, the observation that contributing to the writing of technical standards and rules carries more long term impact than simply following them, and the view that building things directly teaches lessons that cannot be replicated through job titles or formal positions alone. Organisers have described the session as intended to give students a practical roadmap for standing out early in their careers, particularly those interested in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and telecommunications engineering.
The session is being coordinated by faculty members within the Telecommunications Engineering Department, including Associate Professor Sundus Ali, who holds senior membership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and its Communications Society, alongside colleagues Muhammad Imran Aslam, Irfan Ahmed, Hira Mariam and Wasla Zainab Awan. The event is open to all students and faculty interested in the subject matter, reflecting a broader effort by the department to expose students directly to professionals working at the intersection of telecommunications, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence in international settings.
The session forms part of a growing trend among Pakistani engineering institutions to bring in practitioners with international industry experience to speak directly with students, particularly in fast evolving fields such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity where formal academic curricula can sometimes lag behind the pace of industry developments. Sessions of this kind are increasingly viewed by university departments as a way of supplementing classroom instruction with perspectives grounded in real world standards work and industry practice, giving students earlier exposure to the kinds of questions and career paths they are likely to encounter after graduation.
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