US Ambassador Dan Mozena expressed hope that Bangladesh would be a middle income country in terms of quality of life in the very near future.
From the “bottomless basket,” he said, Bangladesh would very soon become an “overflowing basket.”
The ambassador was speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the second International Conference on Advances in Electrical Engineering 2013 at Independent University, Bangladesh’s Bashundhara campus yesterday.
The infamous 1974 remark that Bangladesh was a bottomless basket is attributed to former US foreign secretary Henry Kissinger.
A total of 233 researchers from 13 countries have been registered and 90 papers have been accepted in the three-day long conference. Dr Ali Shihab Sabbir, dean of School of Engineering and Computer Science at IUB, said: “Electrical Engineering is the driving force behind the recent technological developments and the conference aims to exchange ideas regarding electrical engineering from all over the world.”
Apart from Mozena, Dr Samir El-Ghazaly, division director of the National Science Foundation, USA, also attended the inauguration of the conference by IUB founding trust Chairman Saifur Rahman. Among others Dr Pran K Saha, Dr Shamimuzzaman Bosunia, and Dr Mohammad S Alam spoke on the occasion.
