| Danial Norjidi |
THE establishment of an Artificial Intelligence Institute in Brunei Darussalam was proposed by a top academic from the Republic of Korea yesterday.
Professor Lee Soo-young from Korea Advance presented the proposal during the Brunei-Korea ICT Conference to Promote New Industry, which took place at the Prime Minister’s Office Building.
In his presentation, he spoke about exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the establishment of an Artificial Intelligence Institute in Brunei.
The role of this institute would be education, research and development, and business incubation for Bruneian institutes, and Artificial Intelligence would be the strategic area of focus. It would involve collaboration with domestic and international organisations.
Among the proposed institute’s objectives would be to establish an internationally-competitive organisation to help Bruneian industries for economic.
“We emphasise ‘internationally-competitive’ because we need to be globally competitive to help Bruneian industries for economic development and to transform Brunei into an industrialising country,” he said, highlighting that simply being the best in your own country is not enough, and that being globally competitive should be the goal.
It will require educating highly-qualified scientists and engineers with both theory and practical knowledge, conducting socially relevant research and development (R&D) for Bruneian industries as well as promoting and mentoring business, especially start-up companies, in Brunei Darussalam.
He went on to provide background on the rationale behind focusing on AI. Speaking on Brunei trends, he noted the needs of industrial reformation, saying that oil rents have been decreasing, and that imports are increasing.
On global industrialisation trends, he highlighted that from heavy industries to information industries, things are now moving towards software industries.
In his presentation he showed stages of industrialisation.
Professor Lee Soo-young speaking at the conference. – DANIAL NORDIN
Stage 1 was the industrial revolution by machinery, Stage 2 the rapid industrialisation by steel and oil industries, and Stage 3 was the extending into information and telecommunication industries.
Stage 4 is the move towards software industries. Artificial intelligence based on deep learning is becoming the mega trend he said, noting that companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu are heading towards the new AI era.
He also quoted Bill Gates, saying, “AI will become business which is 10 times bigger than Microsoft.”
Professor Lee then went on to list recent success of learning-based AI, beginning with 1997 when IBM’s DeepBlue defeated the world’s chess champion, before moving onto more recent examples in 2015, such as Google’s autonomous car demonstrating less accidents than average human drivers, and IBM Watson demonstrating better accuracy of medical image readings than human medical doctors.
“During the past several years, deep-learning has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, sometimes even better than human performance, in continuous speech recognition and image recognition tasks.”
He highlighted that Brunei has high potential for software, especially AI.
Professor Lee said that this is because software industries need relatively small investment, unlike the big investments required in car manufacturing and refineries.
“Software does not need a big investment. The only thing you need is people. People are the most important assets for the software industry,” he said.
People and data are also the most important components of AI success, and the AI industry is now up-and-coming.
His presentation also shared other reasons for Brunei’s high potential for AI, noting Brunei’s almost 100 per cent secondary school enrolment and high and rapidly growing tertiary school enrolment, as well as Brunei’s strong government.
Professor Lee then spoke on the proposed institute’s functions, beginning with that of education.
Under this function, it would offer a graduate programme on science and engineering, involving a collaboration or joint programme with existing undergraduate universities, as well as a Master of Science degree at the first phase, and a PhD at the second phase. The education would offer breadth for multidisciplinary R&D, depth on one area (AI) for global competitiveness, and personality with leadership.
Another function would be R&D, with an emphasis on applied science and leading-edge practical engineering.
A third function is that of business promotion, offering incubation and mentoring for small and start-up companies.
He touched on strategic AI sub-areas, highlighting that AI is an enabling technology to many applications. Technology examples include: speech recognition and speaker recognition; image/video recognition and computer vision; emotion recognition; natural language processing; knowledge development; situation awareness; and decision-making.
Professor Lee noted that the Korean government is currently establishing a new artificial intelligence research institute, and that seven business groups have invested in it.
Application/industry examples include: decision support systems (medical/healthcare, law, etc); question and answering agents; intelligent robots; smart manufacturing; smart homes; Internet-of-things (IoT); autonomous vehicles; drones; security; finance; and semiconductor.
He then outlined the proposed institute’s operations strategy. He said that it would be industry-oriented, government-sponsored (particularly in the early stage), with focused areas, outsourcing and collaboration. It would also utilise efficient management, while also doing simultaneous research and personnel education.
Lastly, he shared some of the expected outcomes of the proposed institute, which include educating high-quality graduate engineers for IT industries, who will serve as the next generation leaders and experts for industrial development and economic growth in Brunei Darussalam and Southeast Asia.
He added that the proposed institute would also conduct world-class R&D on AI and its applications, and promote business developments for sustainable economic growth in Brunei Darussalam, while also attracting foreign investment to Bruneian companies.
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