Associate professor & Head Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing. He is currently an associate professor at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan, where he is also the founding head of Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing and coordinates MS programs in Software Project Management and MS Computer Scien-

ce (specialization in Script, Speech and Language Processing). He has been working in the area of local language computing since 1997. He has successfully lead and completed the Nafees Nasta'leeq font project (funded by IDRC, APDIP UNDP and APNIC) and is currently leading development of Urdu Machine Translation, Text-to-Speech system and Lexicon systems through a three year 30 person project funded by E-Government Directorate of Government of Pakistan. He is also leading Urdu Spell-Checker project and advising on Urdu Terminology Translation project for Microsoft, USA.. He is member of the national body of Pakistan for standardization of Pakistani Languages for computing and has authored the proposal which enabled complete Urdu support in Unicode. Within this committee, he is heading the Character set and Collation Sequence Standardization Sub-committee, which is currently working on standardization of Urdu, Pashto, Punjabi, Balochi and Sindhi languages. He is a member of Bidi List of Unicode, which looks into the standardization issues of bidirectional languages. Dr. Sarmad Hussain has been awarded with Dr. M. N. Azam prize for Computer Science (2002) by Pakistan Academy of Sciences, Government of Pakistan, for his services to Urdu language computing. He is also a nominated member of PTCL R&D Fund committee which is responsible to promote R&D in IT and Telecommunications in Pakistan.