Artificial Intelligence or AI, which appears to be the newest and most exciting frontier in science and engineering, attempts to emulate humans in performing complex tasks by means of learning, adapting and automation.

I did not have many opportunities to meet Amir Ahmed Chowdhury personally, but I got to know about him from so many people that whenever we met it felt like we were close friends. He had this strong aura about him. And he was a man of empathy and action.

I recently visited rural areas of Bangladesh amid the Covid-19 pandemic and returned to Dhaka with a new understanding of the impact that Covid-19 is having on child marriage, a harmful practice that is a global challenge.

Would you, as a parent, want your daughter to fall behind your son? Have her potentials remain unfulfilled? Most probably not.

The end of the year is a good time to reflect. The devastating pandemic marked a year few of us would ever forget.

An abrupt increase in rice price has produced deep concern and confusion among policymakers.

On February 3, 2020, Huoshenshan Hospital, an emergency specialty field hospital covering an area of 34,000 square metres and containing 1,000 beds, opened its doors for the treatment of Covid-19 patients in Wuhan, China.

“Won’t you change your birth year?” my class teacher had asked with a confused look. She was processing the paperwork for changed birth years in our class nine cohort, and amidst all the “new” 1992s and 1993s, I was one of the two “original” 1991s left.

The question of the moment is with what learning we are entering the new year.

The Academic Experience Project is a faculty-student collaborative work aimed to glean insights about the experiences of tertiary-level students. Each Friday, The Daily Star publishes an op-ed highlighting its findings. This is the ninth article of the series.

Never in history had the world as a whole looked forward to a new year like we did in 2020. So far, welcoming a new year had been a routine exercise.

Why does the year 2020 still linger around? The Covid-19 pandemic has brought our civilisation to its knees this year. We’re already tired, scared, and hopeless.

The year 2020 was like no other in recent history. It saw, in the words of WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom, a “once-in-a-century health crisis”, referring to the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to rage across the world.

The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic has starkly revealed the other face of globalisation, particularly in the context of international migrant workers.

Muazzem Ali had joined the prestigious Pakistan Foreign Service only a couple of years before, and Washington DC was his first diplomatic assignment. As a career foreign service official he had a bright and brilliant future awaiting him had he chosen not to leave the job and risk his career for a fledgling government that was fighting for independence from exile.

For all of South Asia, 2020 has been a year that cannot be over fast enough. This is true for Bangladesh too, even as the International Monetary Fund’s latest Economic Outlook reported that the nation has overtaken India in GDP per capita.

Today is the first death anniversary of Ambassador Syed Muazzem Ali. He was born in Sylhet in 1944 to an enlightened and accomplished family.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG) remains the prima facie directional narrative for our collective progression towards a more equitable economy—both at home and abroad.

I visited more than a dozen small and medium sized towns in Bangladesh during the last two months to get a good understanding about our urbanisation trends.

Sexual violence and the fear of sexual abuse can have a profound and devastating effect on not only individuals but entire communities.