Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar

International Exposure and Professional Experience:

• University Roles: With over a decade of experience as an Assistant Professor and Tenured Associate Professor at the University of Portland, Oregon, USA, and Kuwait University, Kuwait, from August 1988 to December 2001, Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar has held significant academic positions. The University of Portland and Kuwait University are UNESCO-listed institutions. He served as the elected Secretary of the University of Portland’s Academic Senate (1996-97) and Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Information Technology, the largest and most influential of all Presidential Advisory Committees at the University of Portland, Oregon.
• Statewide Involvement: While residing in Oregon, Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar was appointed as a member of a powerful Statewide Steering Committee to develop selection criteria and assist in the recruitment process for the Oregon Commission on Asian Affairs, which was established in 1995 through a legislative process. This role was a gubernatorial appointment, and he was the only member chosen from South Asia and neighboring regions.
• Global Training: Under the USAID-sponsored Higher Education System Strengthening Activity (HESSA) project, Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar accompanied more than 10 Vice Chancellors from various Pakistani universities to the University of Utah and Washington, D.C., in July 2022, and Incheon Global Campus, South Korea, in March 2023, for training programs and meetings. He engaged with faculty members, senior leadership at universities, and officials from the U.S. State Department and USAID.

National-Level Professional Contributions:

• Chairman of NCEAC:  As the founding member, Vice Chairman, Acting Chairman, and current Chairman of the National Computing Education Accreditation Council (NCEAC) under Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission (HEC), Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar has played a pivotal role in establishing and operating NCEAC, modeled after the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSEB). His leadership has been instrumental in accrediting over 400 computing programs across more than 130 higher education institutions in Pakistan.
• Board Memberships: Mansoor Sarwar has also served as a member of the Board of Directors for the National ICT R&D Fund, Islamabad, and the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), chaired by the Chief Minister of Punjab. He was also the Chair of the UNESCO International Institute of Online Education (IIOE) in 2021.

Awards and Honors:

• Nominations: Mansoor Sarwar was nominated by the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Iowa State University for the Anson Marston Medal in 2021 and again in 2023. This prestigious award recognizes distinguished alumni for outstanding achievements in advancing engineering science, technology, or policy with national and international impact.
• Book Rankings: Mansoor Sarwar’s books on UNIX and Linux were highly ranked by Book Authority, a platform recognized by CNN, Forbes, and Inc., in 2021-2022. These rankings reflect the significant impact of his work in the academic and professional communities.

1. Ranked 1ston the Best Unix eBooks of All Time list—Ranking discontinued in 2024
2. Ranked 2ndon the Best Unix Books of All Time list—2nd 14th & 3rd Ed. 67th currently
3. Ranked 25thon the Best-selling Operating Systems Books of All Time list—not ranked currently
4. Ranked 6thon the Best Linux Mint eBooks of All Time list— ranked 13th currently
5. Ranked 5thon Best-Selling Linux Mint Books of All Time list— ranked 12th currently
6. Ranked 7thon the Best Linux Mint Books for Beginners list— ranked 4th currently
7. National Engineering Excellence Awardby Institution of Engineers Pakistan (IEP), March 4, 2023
8. Governor’s Awardby Governor of the province of Punjab (Chancellor of the universities of Punjab), for authoring internationally recognized books on UNIX and Linux, September 29, 2021
9. HonoraryShield for Excellence in Teaching, presented by the students of graduate course “Advanced Operating Systems,” Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kuwait University, May 2000
10. Invitedto the Commencement Awards Luncheon by the Engineering graduate with the most outstanding scholastic record, 1994, 1997, 1998
11. Nominated by the Dean, Multnomah School of Engineering for the University of Portland Excellence in Teaching Award, 1997
12. Certificatefrom the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Multnomah School of Engineering, University of Portland, Oregon, for Outstanding Service, 1996-97
13. A Member of the 10-member StatewideSteering Committee to develop selection criteria and assist in the recruitment process for the Oregon Commission on Asian Affairs, which was born on July 18, 1995 through a legislative process in the state of Oregon, USA. The appointment was made by the Governor of Oregon. I was the only member chosen from the sub-continent and other neighboring countries (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.).
14. Nominatedfor Excellence in Research Student Award, Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Iowa State University, 1988

PhD Theses Supervised

1. Muddassira Arshad, “User-Centric Information Representation to Mitigate Information Overload,” Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, 2024
2. Muhammad Idrees, “VisFra: An Extensible Framework for Visual Programming,” Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, 2019
3. Muhammad Kamran Malik, “Named Entity Recognition and Classification System for Urdu Language,” Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, 2018
4. Ather Ashraf, “Spatial Fuzzy Intelligence System for Land Suitability Model,” Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, 2015
5. Zarqa Shaheen, “Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Bringing Change Among Youngster’s Life: A Gender Perspective,” Institute of Communication Studies (ICS), University of the Punjab, 2012

Selected Journal Papers

1. Arshad, M. M. Yousaf, S. M.Sarwar, “Comprehensive Readability Assessment of Scientific Learning Resources,” IEEE Access, Vol. 11, pp. 53978-53994, 2023. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3279360 [Impact Factor = 3.476]
2. Khalid, M. M. Yousaf, K. Murtaza, S. M.Sarwar, “Image de-fencing using histograms of oriented gradients,” Signal, Image, and Video Processing (SIViP), Vol. 12, No. 6, pp. 1173-1180, 2018. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11760-018-1266-0 [Impact Factor = 1.643]
3. Idrees, F. Aslam, K. Shahzad, S. M. Sarwar, “Towards a Visual Framework for Visual Programming Languages,” Pakistan Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 55-65, 2018.  [X Category].
4. Adnan, F. Aslam, Z. Nawaz, S. M.Sarwar, “Rubus: A compiler for seamless and extensible parallelism,” PLoS ONE Vol. 12, No. 12, December 2017: e0188721. [Impact Factor = 2.766]
5. Faisal, M. Sarwar, K. Shahzad, S. Sarwar, W. Jaffry, M. Murtaza Yousaf, “Temporal and Evolving Data Warehouse Design,” Scientific Programming, Vol. 2017, Article ID 7392349, pages 18, 2017. DOI:10.1155/2017/7392349. [Impact Factor = 1.344]
6. H. Ch, M. Ashraf, Q. Hamid, S.M. Sarwar, Z. A. Saqib, “Geospatial Techniques for Assessment of Bank Erosion and Accretion in the Marala Alexandria Reach of the River Chenab, Pakistan,” Sains Malaysiana, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 413-420, March 2017.  DOI: dx.doi.org/10.17576/jsm-2017-4603-08. [Impact Factor = 0.565]
7. Khan, H. A. Basit, M. Sarwar, M. Yousaf, “Cloning in Server Side Web Technologies: An Empirical Study,” Pakistan Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 1-13, 2018. [X Category]
8. Malik and S. M. Sarwar, “Urdu Named Entity Recognition System using Hidden Markov Model,” Pakistan Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 15-22, 2017. [X Category]
9. Suhail, M. Sarwar, K. Murtaza, “Automatic Detection of Abnormalities in Mammograms,” BMC Medical Imaging, Vol. 15, No. 53, November 2015. DIO: dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12880-015-0094-8. [Impact Factor = 1.635]
10. Aslam and M. Sarwar, “Handling Slowly Changing Dimensions in Data Warehouses”, Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), Vol. 94, Issue August, pp. 151-160, 2014. [Impact Factor = 2.278]
11. Aslam and M. Sarwar, “Temporal and multi-versioned XML documents: A survey,” Information Processing and Management, Vol. 50, Issue 1, pp. 113-131, 2014. [Impact Factor = 3.444]
12. Maqbool, H. Babri, A. Karim, M. Sarwar, “Metarule-Guided Association Rule Mining for Program Understanding,” IEE Proceedings Software (Now: IET Software),Volume 152, Issue 6, pp. 281-296, 2005. [Impact Factor = 0.947]
13. Malik, O. Khan, T. Mobashir, S. M. Sarwar, “Migratable sockets in cluster computing,” The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 75, No. 1-2, pp. 171-177, 2005. [Impact Factor = 2.278]
14. Karim, S. I. Jami, I. Ahmad, M. Sarwar, Z. Uzmi, “Clustering IP Addresses using Longest Prefix Matching and Nearest Neighbor Algorithms,” PRICAI 2004: Trends in Artificial Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Volume 3157, pp. 965-966, 2004. [Impact Factor= 0.4 in 2005]
15. Hoffbeck, M. Sarwar, E. Rix, “Interfacing MATLAB with a Parallel Virtual Processor for Matrix Operations,” The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 77-80, 2001. [Impact Factor = 2.278]
16. Al-Saqabi, S. M. Sarwar, K. Saleh, “Distributed Gang Scheduling in Networks of Heterogeneous Workstations,” Computer Communications, 20, pp. 338-348, 1997. [Impact Factor = 2.613]
17. M. Sarwar, E. E. Parks, S. A. Sarwar, “Laboratory Exercises for Practical Performance of Algorithms and Data Structures,” IEEE Transactions on Education, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 39-47, 1996. [Impact Factor = 1.600]
18. M. Sarwar, S. A. Sarwar, M. H. A. Jaragh, J. Brandeburg, “Engineering Quicksort,” COMPUTER LANGUAGES (Now: COMPUTER LANGUAGES: Systems and Structures), Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 39-47, 1996. [Impact Factor = 1.840]
19. M. Sarwar, M. H. A. Jaragh, M. Wind, “An Empirical Study of the Run-Time Behavior of Quicksort, Shellsort, and Mergesort for Medium to Large Size Data,” COMPUTER LANGUAGES (Now: COMPUTER LANGUAGES: Systems and Structures), Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 127-134, 1994. [Impact Factor = 1.840]
20. M. Sarwarand J. A. Davis, “New Families of Combinators for Efficient List Manipulation,” The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 137-146, 1994. [Impact Factor = 2.278]
21. M. Sarwar, “Run-Time Behavior of SASL Programs: A Performance Study,” COMPUTER LANGUAGES (Now: COMPUTER LANGUAGES: Systems and Structures), Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 205-211, 1993. [Impact Factor = 1.840]
22. M. Sarwarand M. Abu-Amara, “Functional Languages: A Performance Study,” The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 163-167, 1993. [Impact Factor = 2.278]
23. M. Sarwar, S. J. Hahn, and J. A. Davis, “Implementing Functional Languages on a Combinator-Based Reduction Machine,” ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 63-67, 1988. [Impact Factor = 0.335]
24. Jacobson, S. Gaitonde, J. Kim, J. Lee, D. Rover, M. Sarwar, and M. Shafiq, “A Master/Slave Monitor Measurement Technique for an Operating Ethernet Network,” IEEE Network, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 40-48, 1987. [Impact Factor = 7.197]

Conference Papers

1. R. Khan and M. Sarwar, “Personality Traits and Academic Performance in Computer Science Courses, Proceedings of the 11thAnnual International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED 2017), Valencia, Spain, March 6-8, 2017.
2. R. Khan and M. Sarwar, “The HEXACO Personality Inventory and Academic Performance in MIS Course,” 3rd International Conference on Computational and Social Sciences (ICCSS-2015), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia, Aug 25-27, 2015.
3. R. Khan and M. Sarwar, “A Success Evaluation Model for Campus Management Solution (CMS) Systems,” 2nd International Conference on Computational and Social Sciences (ICCSS-2014), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan University, Rize, Turkey, Aug 26-28, 2014.
4. Farooq and S. M. Sarwar, “Real-Time Data Warehousing for Business Intelligence”, Frontiers of Information Technology 2010 (FIT 2010), International Conference, COMSATS, Islamabad, December 21-23, 2010.
5. Karim, I. Ahmad, S. I. Jami, M. Sarwar,  “Cluster Analysis of Traffic Flows on a Campus Network”, Proceedings of the IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelligence And Applications (AIA 2006), Innsbruck, Austria, February 13-16, 2006.
6. Maqbool, A. Karim, H. A. Babri, M. Sarwar, “Reverse Engineering Using Association Rules,” Proceedings of the Eight IEEE International Multitopic Conference (INMIC), Lahore, Pakistan, Dec. 24 – 26, 2004.
7. Saeed, O. Maqbool, H. Babri, S. Z. Hassan, M. Sarwar, “Software Clustering Techniques and the Use of Combined Algorithm”, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, Benevento, Italy, March 26-28, 2003 (CSMR 2003), pp. 301-306, published by IEEE Computer Society Press.
8. M. Sarwarand L. B. Al-Tabtabai, “An Architecture For Parallel Evaluation of Combinator-Based Functional Languages,” Proceedings of Parallel Computing 89, Leiden, Netherlands, Aug 29-Sep 1, 1989. Published in Advances in Parallel Computing, Vol. 2 (1990), pp. 533-539, Edited by David J. Evans, Gerhard R. Joubert, Frans J. Peters, North-Holland, NY, USA
9. M. Sarwar, “Combinator-Based Functional Languages for Parallel Architectures,” 100th Session of Iowa Academy of Science, Ames, Iowa, March 1988.
10. A. Davis, S. M. Sarwar, A. V. Pohm, S. Venkataraman, “A Fine-Grain Parallel Architecture For Scientific Computing,” Proceedings of IEEE/ACM International Supercomputing Conference, Santa Clara, California, November 1987.
11. M. Sarwar, “Effect of UNIX Operating System on Bus Traffic”, MS Thesis, Published in the 23rdAnnual Report, Affiliate Program in Electronics, Science, and Technology, compiled by Prof. Dr. T. A. Smay (Program Manager), 1985. 

Popular Articles

1. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Nobel Prize: The Gender Gap and Exceptional Marie Curie,” https://www.pakdestiny.com/nobel-prize-the-gender-gap-and-exceptional-marie-curie/, December 10,
2. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Why no Nobel Prize in Mathematics: The Myths and Reality,” https://www.pakdestiny.com/why-no-nobel-prize-in-mathematics-the-myths-and-reality/, November 28,
3. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Women in IT: the life story of Augusta Ada King Byron”, page A9 (Perspectives), Daily Times, May 24,
4. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Women in IT: The Life Story of Augusta Ada King Byron”, May 25, (Unedited version of the above article)

Women in IT: The Life Story of Augusta Ada King Byron

1. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Pakistan and the Internet at 48”, page A9 (Perspectives), 6-column article, Daily Times, November 27,
2. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Internet: 48 and Going Strong”, December 10, 2017. https://www.pakdestiny.com/internet-48-going-strong/ (Unedited version of the above article)
3. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Happy Birthday, Internet!”, page A5 (National News), 6-column article, Daily Times, November 21,
4. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “A Legend Lost to Incompetence”, page 15, col. 1, Dawn, November 21,
5. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, “Ramadan in Portland.” Front page, column one article, KuwaitTime, No. 11260, January 3,

Books

Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar is the first author of six textbooks on UNIX and Linux operating systems, published by Addison-Wesley, Boston, USA, and CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton, Florida, USA. His books have been adopted by over 200 U.S. colleges and universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Arizona, Stevens Institute of Technology, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University. These textbooks are also being used in several other countries, including Canada, the UK, Belgium, and Australia. Chinese and Spanish translations of his books are utilized in China, Hong Kong, Spain, and Mexico. More than 50,000 copies of his books have been sold worldwide.

Notably, “UNIX: The Textbook, Third Edition,” was published on October 10, 2016, and “Linux: The Textbook, Second Edition,” was published on September 18, 2018. The U.S. Navy is using “UNIX: The Textbook, Third Edition” for one of its training programs.

Chinese and Spanish Translations of Books