Weak infrastructure reduced Iran's ranking in technology competitions.
🔹Hossein Afshin, referring to the necessity of assessing the country's situation based on specific metrics, said: When we want to evaluate a field, we must check whether we have succeeded in winning medals and rankings in its various categories. In my view, this matter has a completely transparent mechanism.
For example, when discussing the quality of education, one can look at the country's performance in student Olympiads; we have managed to win gold, silver, and bronze medals. This year we earned, for the first time, a gold medal in artificial intelligence, which shows that we have strong capability in the education sector.
🔹 Apart from this issue, we should check whether we managed to reach the top ranking in the robotics competition. As is known, we participated in a competition in South Korea, but we did not manage to secure first, second, or third place. Of course we did not expect such an outcome at this stage, because first, our teams were trained late, and second, there was no serious support in this field over the past years.
Nevertheless, I think we can guarantee that next year we will achieve a good ranking in robotics competitions and will follow this matter seriously.
When we examine international metrics, there is a special mechanism, part of which is related to infrastructure, and when we fail to create suitable infrastructure in the country, it is natural that our ranking will decline.
There are several important parameters in this field. We are very strong in terms of human resources and one could almost say the country has good capability in education and in training creative human resources, but we face weaknesses in the infrastructure sector.
To solve this problem we have a detailed plan and we are implementing it to allocate appropriate resources to the country's infrastructure and laboratory equipment. If you visit the universities, you will see that our lab equipment is obsolete. Obsolescence does not simply mean that the equipment has high technology and is now depreciated, but in some cases we are basically facing the problem of lack of suitable equipment and technology and we have to solve this problem.
🔹 I have traveled to almost all the provinces of the country and there is only one provincial capital left, which I hope to visit next week as well. What I saw during these trips is the emergence of a kind of \"technological shortage\" in the country.
When we talk about deprivation, we usually refer to the lack of financial resources, roads, and basic facilities, but when I talk about technology deprivation, there may be a very rich and high‑income company in a part of the country that does not use new technologies. This issue means creating an exclusion in the use of technology. 🔹 We are supposed to be able to present new technologies to companies and also to different cities in the country and encourage them to use these technologies so that we can achieve growth in production and increase productivity.
No country can grow its production beyond a mechanism, unless it uses new technologies and relies on creative methods. Some of these creative methods can be seen among students.
🔹 If we can receive appropriate support for these capabilities, I believe that the Iran of the future will indeed be an Iran with developing, advanced, and creative technologies.