Tahir Ramzan

• Tahir promotes opensource education and technologies. He initiated Opensource Literate Pakistan to aware and to educate people regarding potential, possibilities, and opportunities of opensource. He conducted opensource and Google Summer of Code awareness sessions with Azad Chaiwala, Junaid Ansari, Carla Riechman, Saad Hamid, Amineshwar Kaur, Rayanul Kabir, Stateviews.pk, Muhammad Ali Rajper, Muhammad Iqbal Trainer, Radio FM 101 Mirpur, and Scholarship Network Community.
• Tahir is the petitioner of public interest litigation in Islamabad High Court (Tahir Ramzan versus Federation of Pakistan and others - Writ Petition # 399/2020) against intellectual dishonesty, record tampering, and data manipulation in Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication and its projects. Tahir pointed out irregularities, incompetencies, and corrupt practices in the Prime Minister’s Pakistan Citizen Portal and the Virtual University of Pakistan: Writ Petition Link
• In early 2017, Tahir led an awareness campaign regarding cryptocurrencies and their misuse, which was a scam to fool the public. This campaign prompted the Deputy Inspector General of Police and Commissioner Mirpur Division to release a press advisory statement based upon his campaign. Subsequently, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan did the same. Later that turned out a multi-billion global scam: Article Link
• Tahir initiated a campaign about “ATM Card Swipe Swindle” in 2016. Where he achieved success in generating awareness concerning this fraud, which affected the majority of ATM card users in restaurants and fast-food outlets, his work included alerting the authorities since the public could be manipulated, and the potential for misuse of ATM cards was high.
• Tahir also initiated and successfully led a campaign for his university students called “Protest against Discrimination in Prime Minister’s Laptop Scheme” in 2014. The outcome of this campaign was that his university received quota in the scheme for its students. Along with his fellows, he has proven how a peaceful protest can be successful through intellectual dialog. This campaign took 18 months of continuous struggle and hard work, which included social media awareness, print media press coverage, and communication with higher authorities and the government.

Coming from a family with an unfortunate financial situation, Tahir has been working since his childhood. He has had many different types of work experiences, including working as an office boy, laborer, electrician, and supporting staff and tutor as well as spending time as a volunteer. He left his kindergarten school after passing level 02 in 1999, going on to work with his father in a college canteen in 2002 as a support-worker. In 2003 he left that college canteen and started another. Where the principal of the college offered him free education; the college classes were 03 years higher than his current educational level. That principal left the college within a year, so Tahir finalized his study after passing level 06. In 2006, he was admitted as a private/non-regular candidate in the examination of level 09 and 10 and passed. After that, he worked in varying capacities in different places as he needed to leave often to make time for his studies and exams. He gained a one-year vocational Electrical Certificate in 2007 and a one-year vocational Electrician Certificate in 2008. He passed levels 11 and 12 in 2009 as a private/non-regular student while working with lawyers as part of their support staff. He then gained admission to an e-learning and distance university, the Virtual University of Pakistan, where he graduated with dual bachelor degrees in BSIT and BSCS. He studied MSCS and worked on his research project “Teaching of Mathematics using IT”; the theme of the project is “Future Technologies in E-learning and Distance Education.” Tahir is a two times Google Summer of Code student. GSOC is a prestigious program for the best student programmers across the world, where participating mentoring organizations select a few top proposals out of thousands. He developed refunds and partial payments extension and APIs for CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a constituency relationship management used by many large NGOs, including Amnesty International, Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, CERN, and the Wikimedia Foundation for their fundraising. He implemented Apache HTTPD connector for libModSec (aka ModSec v3). ModSecurity is an open-source web application firewall, a toolkit for real-time web application monitoring, logging, and access control. He was Android Students Club Facilitator and Organizer in 2015, where he was required to teach and train club members about mobile application development; Google-funded ASC and they selected just a few proposals to launch and run this community. The use of information communication and mobile technologies for development is his core research interest, particularly the use of ICT for the education of kindergarten children who are not in school as well as within the agricultural sector where farmers are under-privileged and living below the poverty line. He aims to empower them and to provide real meaning and practical use for ICT amongst people where it has had no positive or productive use until now. His focus is on localized and context-aware human-computer interaction as per sociological, psychological, and pedagogical aspects. His future goal is to dedicate himself to teaching and the education of oppressed children, women, and farmers. He believes in creating the two-subject curriculum; literacy (local language, the national language, and foreign language) and mathematics (problem-solving, critical thinking, and analytical reasoning) because they have less time and resources to get involved in more courses. Their education needs to be blended using technology, e-learning, and distance education. He believes that sustainable development is dependent on education and growing awareness between children, women, and farmers. He loves teaching, training, collaboration, volunteer, research, and development opportunities. He thinks problems are possibilities to make new meaning for the future, and today is the future. He is an advocate of human rights, the economics of education, the industry of knowledge, and open-source paradigm; feel free to ping him if something which lies within.

In his earlier role as CTO at MyVista , with esteemed angel investor Gary Vaynerchuk on board, Vista revolutionized the hospitality sector. He shaped an exceptional platform with mobile apps, offering pixel-perfect, tailor-made experiences aligned with guests' preferences. His proprietary encryption achieved remarkable privacy, rendering data only accessible to intended recipients. He pioneered BLE proximity tracking for efficient short-range communication.

At Nappr , as CTO, his mission was to reimagine on-demand napping through a shared economy model akin to Airbnb—this pioneering effort aimed to enhance health, wellness, and productivity for the sleep-deprived.

His leadership extended to Infrabase where our B2B SaaS solution for infrastructure financing emerged. A revival of Deutsche Infrastructure , this venture garnered funding exceeding EURO 1M and valuation surpassing EURO 10M. Though the product-market fit remained elusive, Infrabase aimed to offer an Investment Clinic SaaS, evaluating Financial, Legal, and Management Readiness.

Furthermore, Tahir spearheaded a project involving massive data extraction:
• Uncovering Feelings, Attitudes, and Sentiments
• Mining Opinions, Detecting Moods and Emotions
• Evaluating Buying Behavior
• Deciphering Personality Tests like MBTI, Big Five Traits, DISC Assessment, Enneagram, and HPI
• Exploring Value Models including Schwartz's Theory and Rokeach Survey

Tahir adeptly led projects and teams, showcasing versatile expertise across a spectrum of programming languages, web and mobile development paradigms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, data science, cloud computing, DevOps, security, design, QA, and emerging technologies.

This journey yielded recognition from elite incubators, accelerators, and competitions such as Antler, Hyper Accelerator, NewChip, Ashurst Legal Labs, London Business School MENA Startup Competition, Stuttgart Financial's finTogether Accelerator, finTechSaudi Accelerator, Qatar Development Bank/Qatar Fintech Hub' Incubator, Taqadam Startup Accelerator, and more.