Its an unfair World!!! « Irfan’s Corner on the Web

26Mar/074

Its an unfair World!!!

Imagine how would you feel if you work very hard on a project, as if your life depended on it for more than a year, and then when you think its up to a stage where you can show it to the world take it to a competition. And whats the result?? A project which has 10% functionality of your own project wins the first price, and you don't even make it in the top 3! That hurts!

The competition in question is NASCON 2007, held in Islamabad. The competition was sponsored by EnterpriseDB, a respected open source consulting company around PostgreSQL. I have no clue who selected the judges for the competition, but of the 6 evaluations which were carried out, only 2, I repeat only 2 actually took demos, and both of them appreciated the complexity of the project. Whereas the 4 others they just listened to the theory and moved to the next stall!

The project which won in my category was done by Misbah Mubarak, a class fellow of mine, who had developed a mobility framework for Java application only. My project, being an operating system, provided mobility for all application regardless of implementation language, and hence theirs was a subset of mine, however the judges selected hers to awarded the top prize! Everyone from the judges, spectators and the Vice-president of EnterpriseDB appreciated our project and recommended that we should start a consultancy around this project.

But I take heart from the fact, that research projects generally do not win software competitions. An alumni from my lab, who had worked on a Grid middleware framework caleld JClarens, failed to win any competition here in Pakistan, primarily because, as in my case probably, they did not comprehend the project. However due to his project he ended up going to CERN, Geneva, Caltech, USA and finally Stanford university for higher studies.

So my advice to everyone involved in research projects in Pakistan is not to lose heart if they fail to make their mark in any local competition, they must remember Pakistan is backwards in terms of technology and the judges in these competitions may be equally backwards and narrow -minded.

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Shuaib

I was there when this all happened, and am eye witness of how much your project was appreciated by all, including couple of the sane judges and the whole of the audience.

The problem was with the selection of the judges. I could see signs of confusion on most of the judges that tried to evaluate your project mostly because of their technological incompetence and their inability to comprehend the wide spread application of your project in the real world. Where your project was addressing real world problem relating to grid computing, most others were either toys, or pretty frontend GUIs build on top of useless base code. Probably the judges were more into the good looks of the GUIs instead of the problem domain of the projects.

The NASCON administration must look into this matter, and should insure the availability of technologically competent judges next time.

But don’t lose hope. Just not winning a single competition isn’t the end of the world. You have a life ahead of you which is going to be full of accomplishments, and higher achievements than just a tiny NASCON medal, InshAllah!

Good Luck!
mozey

NOW you know how mac feels with respects to microsoft or even better, any unix based system felt about microsoft in the early days!.
Kamran

HAHAHAHA. Good one. And Irfan, I’m right there with you man. (I’m his partner in the project, by the way, and so one of the affectees of this fiasco). I agree with Shuaib that the judges were only concentrating on the GUIs, coz NO WAY a simple file format converter could get 4th position while our project was evaluated 8th!!! I’m still dazed from that news.
Masud

I can understand the tragedy. I wasn’t there at all, but I have previously competed in several competitions, so I can sense what might have happened. I will say only two things:

1. I am very glad that even after losing, you are not losing hope and taking it in a positive manner. That is a very encouraging attitude, and definitely such (research based) projects are much more praised when you come abroad. All the best !!

2. I don’t blame the judges. Not everyone can be extremely competent in all technologies. In fact, I would be happy to say that it is much better to be a master of one field rather than being jack of all trades. However, I will definitely appreciate if they, from next time, select a pool of judges who are motivated enough to take a detailed look at every project, and can at least understand how big the project is, and how much effort would have been put to develop this.

Any way, all the best mate.

Winning or losing, it happens all the time in life. Don’t worry about it.