Riyadh– Director of the Artificial Intelligence Initiative at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, said that artificial intelligence during three decades has served humanity and made development and qualitative leap in many fields, especially the medical and economic ones.
Professor Schmidhuber, who is known as the father of modern artificial intelligence, made his statement during his participation in the second edition of the Global AI Summit session discussing the requirements of time, in comparison between the past, the present, and the distant future in which AI dominates the technologies in the world, adding that artificial networks, the development of machine intelligence, the empowerment of smart cities and the manufacture of robots have contributed to the service of humanity and the improvement of life, especially the development of this technology in the medical fields, as it shortened the time and effort in diagnosing cases as quickly and accurately as possible, as well as performing operations.
He explained that AI in the automotive industry is now used on a larger scale than before, as autonomous has become safer through the mechanism of determining lanes, speed, traffic congestion control, and improving car driving to be applied in smart cities such as NEOM and others in line with the Kingdom’s vision 2030.
Professor Schmidhuber said: “The robots have now begun to self-learn after they have crossed many stages over the past decades, and today we are witnessing the use of artificial intelligence technology by companies in the most difficult games such as chess that require mental effort and high concentration as well as the use of the “Facebook” platform 30 billion times a week via smart technology.
Professor Schmidhuber is participating as part of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), along with artificial intelligence innovators, leaders of industry and government sectors, and policymakers worldwide, in the “Global AI Summit ” in its second edition, which kicked off today in Riyadh, with an expected attendance of more than 10,000 people and 200 speakers from 90 countries from around the world.
KAUST is one of the academic institutions active in boosting human capabilities and innovations in artificial intelligence in Saudi Arabia and the region, supported by its infrastructure that includes advanced technologies operated by leading experts such as Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, head of the AI Initiative. KAUST has distinguished collaborative partnerships with key institutions from the public and private sectors in the Kingdom, which contributed to incorporating artificial intelligence in all vital areas such as security, energy, data analytics, and health.
Schmidhuber is a professor specializing in computer science at KAUST and has pioneering projects in artificial intelligence and technology for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), and the neural networks that he worked on developing in his laboratory became by mid-2010 an essential component in more than three billion devices, including smartphones. It is also used billions of times a day for automatic translation on the social networking platform “Facebook”, speech recognition on the “Google” platform, Google Translator, the smart assistant “Siri” from Apple, “Alexa” from Amazon, and other applications.
Schmidhuber, as head of KAUST’s Artificial Intelligence Initiative, is keen to expand basic, interdisciplinary AI research, helping to make people’s lives healthier and easier. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), is a co-founder and chief scientist at NNAISENSE, and was recently Scientific Director at The Swiss AI Lab IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale), Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Lugano, received numerous international awards, authored over 350 research papers, a frequent keynote speaker and advises various governments on AI strategies.
KAUST’s participation will be diverse during the summit days from September 13-15, 2022, where KAUST’s deputy, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Global Researcher in Artificial Intelligence Professor Lawrence Carin, Deputy Director of the KAUST Initiative for Artificial Intelligence, and Professor of Computer Science Professor Bernard Ghanem, will discuss KAUST’s role in Developing artificial intelligence talents in the Kingdom during a panel discussion on human capacity development with the Vice President for Talent Development at the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA), Dr. Abdulrahman Habib.
On the final day of the summit, KAUST Director of Information Technology Jason Ross will discuss the impact of KAUST’s smart initiatives on the university campus and will participate in a dialogue between heads of institutions, universities, and governors about the impact of artificial intelligence on the youth.
Source: Saudi Press Agency