RIYADH — King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) joins AI innovators, industry and government leaders, policy makers and collaborators from around the world at the 2022 Global Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit in Riyadh on Tuesday.

KAUST is working to increase the human capacity and innovation of AI in Saudi Arabia and the region. The summit is a central hub, aligning stakeholders for dialogue and strategy.

Since establishing the KAUST Artificial Intelligence Initiative in 2021 and naming world-renowned, “father of modern AI” Jürgen Schmidhuber as its director, KAUST has leveraged its considerable infrastructure of pioneering experts and advanced technologies to partner with key public and private sector institutions in Saudi Arabia to embed AI in major areas of national impact in the Kingdom in areas such as security, energy, data analytics and health.

In the morning of the first day of the event, Schmidhuber gave an address on AI. The KAUST professor of computer science is known for his pioneering work in the field of AI and deep learning neural networks (DNNs).

By the mid-2010s, his lab’s DNNs had become integral components in more than three billion devices, including smartphones, used billions of times per day for Facebook’s automatic translation, Google’s speech recognition, Google Translate, Apple’s Siri & QuickType and Amazon’s Alexa. As director of the KAUST AII, Schmidhuber is keen to expand cross-disciplinary AI research in addition to core AI research.

“Our AI is helping to make human lives longer, healthier and easier,” Professor Schmidhuber said.

KAUST Provost Lawrence Carin, a world-class researcher in AI and professor of electrical engineering, and Bernard Ghanem, deputy director of the KAUST AI Initiative and professor of computer science, discussed KAUST’s role in the development of AI talent in the Kingdom during a panel on human capacity development with Abdulrahman Habib, vice president for Talent Development at The National Center for AI (NCAI)/SDAIA.

On the last day of the summit, Jason Roos, Chief Information Officer at KAUST, will speak about the impact of KAUST Smart initiatives on the KAUST campus, and participate in a high-level dialogue between institutions, universities and governors focusing on AI’s impact on youth. — SG