Young Sri Lankan chairs Expert Group’s session at International Telecom Union in Geneva

Shazna Zuhyle, a young Sri Lankan researcher from the Colombo-based LIRNEasia, a regional policy research body, chaired an International Telecommunication Union expert group meeting in Geneva on Tuesday.

The 8th meeting of the Expert Group on Telecommunication/ICT Indicators  started on September 12.

The expert group will consider a revision to the current data, messaging and voice price benchmarks, which are used by international organizations to rank countries and build composite indices to measure development goals, said Rohan Samarajiva founding Chair of LIRNEasia.

“It  will consider a revision to the current data, messaging and voice price benchmarks, which are used by international organizations to rank countries and built composite indices to measure development goals.”

As chair of the committee, Shazna proposed changes to existing methodology based on evidence gathered from all member states of the ITU,. The core of her recommendations will drive towards building methodology that is based on data from all member states.

The ITU is one of the oldest specialized agencies of the United Nations, established in 1865. The organization consists of three arms; the radio communications bureau, the standardization bureau and the development bureau.

Shazna first worked with the ITU in 2009 as an intern, following her masters. In 2011, she was part of a team of LIRNEasia researchers who were invited by the ITU to present their work on broadband quality of service. She was invited to the expert group meeting in 2012, and has consulted for the ITU on data acquisition for the Asia Pacific since 2013. It was at the beginning of this year (2017) that she was invited to chair the expert committee which would revise the bench marking methodology.

Shazna has an M.Sc (with distinction) in Telecommunications from the University College of London, and a B.Sc (Hons) in Information Systems from the Manchester Metropolitan University through Informatics Institute of Technology. Following the degree, Shazna was offered a position on the business analyst track at Virtusa Pvt. Ltd. She left the company as a consultant, with considerable experience in British Telecoms projects, in order to pursue her M.Sc.

(The featured  picture at the top shows Shazna Zhuyle)