Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH — Several ministers and senior state officials visited the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) on Monday and got acquainted with the work mechanism at the center and the services it provides to support security and health sectors in countering the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said.

The senior team included State Security Chief Abdulaziz Al-Huwairini; Minister of Commerce and Acting Minister of Media Dr. Majid Bin Abdullah Al-Qasabi; Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdullah Bin Amer Al-Swaha, and a delegation of leading officials at the Ministry of Interior comprising Deputy Minister of Interior Dr. Nasser Al-Dawood; Assistant Minister of Interior for Operations Gen. Said Al-Qahtani; and Undersecretary for Security Affairs at the Ministry of Interior Muhammad Al-Muhanna.

Dr. Abdullah Bin Sharaf Al-Ghamdi, SDAIA president, briefed them on its work mechanism.

Several top officials of the SDAIA explained in detail the role of the center in providing precise information to support the decision-makers in making decisions that support the state’s precautionary and preemptive efforts to counter the spread of coronavirus.

The SDAIA operations center for supporting the security and health sectors, which functions around the clock under highly qualified fully Saudi staff, provides the necessary technological and technical services by providing data stored in the National Data Bank to such sectors. This is with the objective of helping them counter the coronavirus pandemic. The National Data Bank relies on the services of the government cloud platform (Deem).

“Istishraaf” Platform, one of the SDAIA programs, contributes to supporting the center through the use of artificial intelligence techniques in analyzing big data and presenting them to the decision-makers.

This is apart from the advanced identification center, which helps in the precise identification of people via several advanced technologies, which assist the center to work fast while maintaining the safety of workers in the field.