KAUST President Speaks about AI Technology Facing Challenges, Leading World to Better Life

Riyadh, September 14, 2022, SPA -- President of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) Professor Tony F. Chan stressed that AI has greatly contributed to developing the sectors of industry, innovation, health and infrastructure and played a vital role in facing and solving a lot of challenges, noting that this technology has become more important in our present time to serve mankind. During his participation in the 2nd Global AI Summit, currently being organized by the Saudi Data and AI Authority (SDAIA) in Riyadh, he spoke about untapped opportunities between AI, sciences and education. In this regard, he referred to the inability of the international community to realize the Sustainable Development Goals pertaining to reducing the poverty rates to the half, ending famine, ensuring free education for children of the world, maintaining energy, water and mineral resources and using them in a sustainable way, in addition to the joint threats for life elements on earth, in marine environments and the atmosphere. On the ability of AI and robots to realize these goals, Professor Chan said: “Part of the answer to this question is related to the ability of a research institution, such as KAUST, to become a real partner to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the world in facing global challenges. At the university, as part of AI Initiative, we use the AI+X space that enables us to realize the power of AI in solving global problems related to the Sustainable Development Goals. Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, Director of KAUST AI Initiative, worked on developing Long short-term memory (LSTM), which is a technology remarkably contributed to developing and improving AI, where his pre-training for NNs led to the first gradual experience for the deep learning technology.” He noted that LSTM applications today contribute to speech recognition technologies, recognizing visual patterns, medical imaging, machine translation, and auto assistance in smart phones, among other applications that will have an impact on the ninth goal of the Sustainable Development Goal pertaining to industry, innovation and infrastructure, through improving innovations in the industry, automation and infrastructure sector. As for Goal 3 of SDGs (Good health and well-being), LSTM technology offers transformative applications to predict threats of heart and blood vessels diseases and can detect COVID-19 virus through X-ray images, where one of the faculty members at KAUST Professor Xin Gao has developed the first fully automated system based on AI to diagnose COVID-19 through CT scans, segmentation techniques and quantification, where the same AI technology was used for radio-assessment of the breast cancer. KAUST president also explained the impact of this technology on SDG 2 (Zero hunger) through developing smart applications that can predict the planting of rice, in addition to a wide variety of environmental predictions that would improve agricultural production. He said: “Data today is the new oil, especially the unique and comprehensive data groups that can be used in improving thoughts and AI concepts, where I can here cite an initiative that we have launched as part of the Smart Health Initiative at KAUST, which aims at treating single-gene diseases in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where this work is a cooperation between KAUST and King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, where it aims at using big data that include genome, and reading sensors and social, behavioral, environmental and family history, among others.” --SPA