Sunday, December 16, 2018

AI Research Funded By Silicon Valley NEDians at Their Alma Mater in Karachi

Koshish Foundation, an organization funded primarily by NED University Alumni in Silicon Valley, helped fund Koshish Foundation Research Lab (KFRL) in Karachi back in 2014. It has since received additional funding from numerous national and international organizations including DAAD,  German Academic Exchange Service. The lab has been renamed RCAI- Research Center For Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applications
In a letter addressed to NEDians Suhail Muhammad and Raghib Husain,  the RCAI director Dr. Muhammad Khurram said, "I would really like to thank you (and Koshish Foundation) who helped me in making things happen in the start. Still, a lot needs to be done."

Dr. Ata ur Rahman Khan, former chairman of Pakistan Higher Education Commission (HEC), believes there is significant potential to grow artificial intelligence technology and products. In a recent Op Ed in The News, Dr. Khan wrote as follows:

"Pakistan churns out about 22,000 computer-science graduates each year. With additional high-quality training, a significant portion of these graduates could be transformed into a small army of highly-skilled professionals who could develop a range of AI products and earn billions of dollars in exports."

It's notable that Pakistan's tech exports are growing by double digits and surged past $1 billion in fiscal 2018, according to State Bank of Pakistan.

Dutch publication innovationorigins.com recently featured a young Pakistani Tufail Shahzad from Dajal village in Rajanpur District in southern Punjab. Tufail has studied artificial intelligence at universities in China and Belgium.  He's currently working in Eindhoven on artificial intelligence (AI) projects as naval architect and innovation manager at MasterShip Netherlands.

There is at least one Pakistani AI-based startup called Afiniti, founded by serial Pakistani-American entrepreneur Zia Chishti. Afiniti has recently raised series D round of $130 million at $1.6 billion valuation, according to Inventiva. Bulk of the Afiniti development team is located in Thokar Niaz Baig, Lahore. In addition, the company has development team members in Islamabad and Karachi.

Afiniti uses artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to enable real-time, optimized pairing of individual call center agents with individual customers in large enterprises for best results. When a customer contacts a call center, Afiniti matches his or her phone number with any information related to it from up to 100 databases, according to VentureBeat. These databases carry purchase history, income, credit history, social media profiles and other demographic information. Based on this information, Afiniti routes the call directly to an agent who has been determined, based on their own history, to be most effective in closing deals with customers who have similar characteristics.

This latest series D round includes former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg; Fred Ryan, the CEO and publisher of the Washington Post; and investors Global Asset Management, The Resource Group (which Chishti helped found), Zeke Capital, as well as unnamed Australian investors. Investors in Afiniti's C series round included GAM; McKinsey and Co; the Resource Group (TRG); G3 investments (run by Richard Gephardt); Elisabeth Murdoch; Sylvain Héfès; John Browne, former CEO of BP; Ivan Seidenfeld; and Larry Babbio, a former president of Verizon. The company has now raised more than $100 million, including the money previously raised, according to VentureBeat's sources.

Drone is an example of artificial intelligence application. It now a household word in Pakistan. Drones outrage many Pakistanis when used by Americans to hunt militants and launch missiles in FATA. At the same time, drones inspire a young generation of students to study artificial intelligence at 60 engineering colleges and universities in Pakistan. It has given rise to robotics competitions at engineering universities like National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and my alma mater NED Engineering University. Continuing reports of new civilian uses of drone technology are adding to the growing interest of Pakistanis in robotics.

Dr. Ata ur Rehman Khan rightly argues in his Op Ed that AI should be an area of focus for research and development in Pakistan. He says that "the advantage of investing in areas such as artificial intelligence is that no major investments are needed in terms of infrastructure or heavy machinery and the results can become visible within a few years".  "Artificial intelligence will find applications in almost every sphere of activity, ranging from industrial automation to defense, from surgical robots to stock-market assessment, and from driverless cars to agricultural sensors controlling fertilizers and pesticide inputs", Dr. Khan adds.


Related Links:

Haq's Musings

NED Alum Raghib Husain Sells Silicon Valley Company for $7.5 Billion

Pakistan's Tech Exports Surge Past $1 Billion in FY 2018

NED Alum Naveed Sherwani Raises $50 Million For SiFive Silicon Valley Startup

OPEN Silicon Valley Forum 2017: Pakistani Entrepreneurs Conference

Pakistani-American's Tech Unicorn Files For IPO at $1.6 Billion Valuation

Pakistani-American Cofounders Sell Startup to Cisco for $610 million

Pakistani Brothers Spawned $20 Billion Security Software Industry

Pakistani-American Ashar Aziz's Fireeye Goes Public

Pakistani-American Pioneered 3D Technology in Orthodontics

Pakistani-Americans Enabling 2nd Machine Revolution

Pakistani-American Shahid Khan Richest South Asian in America

Two Pakistani-American Silicon Valley Techs Among Top 5 VC Deals

Pakistani-American's Game-Changing Vision 

35 comments:

Anonymous said...

Fantastic news. Karachi and Lahore are set to be transformed in next decade. The best and biggest investment ever seen will be announced shortly by team IK.

Exclusively for your readers and thanks to our friends in Saud family, the package is tipped to include world class financial city in Karachi, Medical clusters in Lahore and Islamabad, logistics and transshipment hub in Gawadar, manufacturing SEZ all over the country, generous donations to Dam Fund and Army foundations. Watch out for big news and thank me later.

Yaseen said...

for AI we need to develop good quality neural networks which help in machine learning capability which is difficult as we lack in good quality chip manufacturing for simple smartphone or computer

Riaz Haq said...

Yaseen: "for AI we need to develop good quality neural networks which help in machine learning capability which is difficult as we lack in good quality chip manufacturing for simple smartphone or computer"

Computer chips can be bought on open market. Embedded cores allow you to customize for your particular application. Pakistani-American NED alum Dr. Naveed Shewani's SiFive sells core IP (intellectual property) based on RISC V ISA. The company's IP Cores are the most widely deployed RISC-V cores in the world. SiFive Core IP is verified and delivered in Verilog for custom SoC (System on Chip) designs.

https://www.riazhaq.com/2018/05/pakistani-american-ned-alum-raises-50.html

Riaz Haq said...

#Pakistani #tech #startup develops #AI #journalist. “With Dante’s help, #media outlets can produce endless original content as it neither sleeps nor tires,” Founder Shiekh says produces content in different formats like online, #radio, #print, #television http://www.arabnews.com/node/1187761#.XBg9J8xM_uE.twitter

A Pakistani tech company has developed an artificially intelligent journalist, the first of its kind, which can produce a complete news item in just a few seconds.
Dante is currently producing 350-word closing reports for the Pakistan Stock Exchange, as well as six-month charts and graphs showing market trends.
“This news-writing bot produces 100 percent original content in just two to three seconds after accessing relevant data from newswires, local and international media outlets,” Anis Shiekh, founder of baseH — the company that created Dante — told Arab News.
“It’s not going to replace reporters and editors. Rather, it will help newsroom staff carry out their work smoothly and quickly.”
Dante can automatically develop and maintain its own archive, and can provide context and background to articles.
“With Dante’s help, media outlets can produce endless original content as it neither sleeps nor tires,” Shiekh said, adding that it can easily produce content in different formats such as online, radio, print and television.
Content generated by Dante was shared with senior Pakistani journalists and editors for feedback.

“It was amazing,” Khurram Shahzad told Arab News. “It was so perfect that it hardly required any editing or even proofreading.”
The working prototype can quickly adapt to new writing styles, editorial policies and preferences, so it can easily be deployed anywhere.
Shiekh said numerous brokerage firms and media houses in Pakistan have expressed their interest in buying Dante, but baseH has decided to provide services via subscription only.
Regarding the company’s future plans, he said it is concentrating on tailoring Dante to produce content on the 2018 World Cup, and to write 700-800-word articles on various subjects, including sports, education, health, entertainment and foreign affairs.
“Our subscribers will be able to get original articles instantly on their required subject by just entering a few keywords related to the topic,” said Shiekh.
His company has been working on Dante since 2009, at a cost so far of more than 6 million Pakistani rupees ($56,980).

Anonymous said...

There are many amazing things going on in Pakistan's tech industry. Some of them were collected in a wonderful book Entrepreneuring Pakistan: 27 stories of struggle, failure and success. By Azhar Rizvi.

This book is available free of charge for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

Zamir

Anonymous said...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07841-9?utm_source=fbk_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf204748004=1

Zamir

Pervesh Maheshwari said...

happy to hear, I was once Interviewed for RCAI, i wish I would have joined

Riaz Haq said...

#Pakistan’s place in #AI and #computing. “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” @ArifAlvi #technology #science #STEM https://tribune.com.pk/story/1892350/6-pakistans-place-ai-computing/

In the world of science and technology, it is being said that we are at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution. The first brought in the age of mechanised production from iron, steel, coal and steam. The second was the result of internal combustion engine and electricity. The third was the digital revolution of information technology brought in by silicon, personal computers, cellphones and the internet. With the exponential ability to store data, the skillset required to analyse it has been left far behind.

The fourth industrial revolution has now begun. It is marked by emerging technology breakthroughs primarily in the following 10 areas, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotics, Internet of Things, 5G Broadband, 3D printing, Autonomous Vehicles, Cloud Computing, Blockchain like Distributed Ledgers Technology, Biotechnology and Precision Medicine, and Augmented Reality.

Klaus Schwab in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution states that previous industrial revolutions liberated man from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people, but the fourth is fundamentally different. It is characterised by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

Reasoning has been the biggest strength of humankind but now it can be relegated to machines. Raw, brute crunching of data was done earlier by super computers like the IBM Deep Blue that defeated Gary Kasporov in 1997. Deep Blue was tutored in the basics of chess and had in its memory the strategy employed by grandmasters in thousands of games previously played.

This year AlphaZero made by Alphabet came up with a unique Algorithm for learning of chess. It started with no knowledge of the game beyond its basic rules, but then it played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, it taught itself enough to take on the biggest computational beast that exists in chess called ‘Stockfish’. The latter was doing 60 million calculations per second while AlphaZero examined only 60,000 but beat Stockfish hollow. In a nutshell this is AI and machine learning. AlphaZero thought smarter not faster.

The convergence of data with massive storage and analytical abilities when applied to available genomic and health data will be creating phenomenal change in human health. A US health service provider ‘Epic’ has health data of more than 100 million individuals. The analysis of such mega data can exponentially improve diagnostics and treatment. ReLeaSE, another algorithm-based programme, comprises two neural networks that can be thought of as a teacher and a student. The teacher neural network knows the rules behind chemical structures of about 1.7 million known biologically active molecules. By working with the teacher, the student neural network learns over time and becomes better at proposing molecules that are likely to be useful in new drugs. Combining CRISPR the gene sequencing and editing technology with AI drug development programmes, can dramatically revolutionise healthcare.

Augmented reality and virtual reality will overlay data-related information on the real world for example in surgery where layers of tissue shall not have to be dissected in search for diseased foci as the surgeon would be able to see the whole thing in 3D before dissection. Increasingly machines, for example autonomous vehicles, are making decisions with little intervention by humans. Some understanding of this new reality has enabled seven out of top 10 largest companies of 2018, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Ali Baba and Tencents to become economic powerhouses.

Riaz Haq said...

#Google chief Sundar Pichai calls for AI regulation, moratorium on facial recognition. #ArtificialInteligence #FacialRecognition | Financial Times

https://www.ft.com/content/73a3fd18-3bb5-11ea-b232-000f4477fbca



Growing up in India, I was fascinated by technology. Each new invention changed my family’s life in meaningful ways. The telephone saved us long trips to the hospital for test results. The refrigerator meant we could spend less time preparing meals, and television allowed us to see the world news and cricket matches we had only imagined while listening to the short-wave radio.

Now, it is my privilege to help to shape new technologies that we hope will be life-changing for people everywhere. One of the most promising is artificial intelligence: just this month there have been three concrete examples of how Alphabet and Google are tapping AI’s potential. Nature published our research showing that an AI model can help doctors spot breast cancer in mammograms with greater accuracy; we are using AI to make immediate, hyperlocal forecasts of rainfall more quickly and accurately than existing models as part of a larger set of tools to fight climate change; and Lufthansa Group is working with our cloud division to test the use of AI to help reduce flight delays.

Yet history is full of examples of how technology’s virtues aren’t guaranteed. Internal combustion engines allowed people to travel beyond their own areas but also caused more accidents. The internet made it possible to connect with anyone and get information from anywhere, but also easier for misinformation to spread.

These lessons teach us that we need to be clear-eyed about what could go wrong. There are real concerns about the potential negative consequences of AI, from deepfakes to nefarious uses of facial recognition. While there is already some work being done to address these concerns, there will inevitably be more challenges ahead that no one company or industry can solve alone.

The EU and the US are already starting to develop regulatory proposals. International alignment will be critical to making global standards work. To get there, we need agreement on core values. Companies such as ours cannot just build promising new technology and let market forces decide how it will be used. It is equally incumbent on us to make sure that technology is harnessed for good and available to everyone.

Now there is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. It is too important not to. The only question is how to approach it.

That’s why in 2018, Google published our own AI principles to help guide ethical development and use of the technology. These guidelines help us avoid bias, test rigorously for safety, design with privacy top of mind, and make the technology accountable to people. They also specify areas where we will not design or deploy AI, such as to support mass surveillance or violate human rights.

But principles that remain on paper are meaningless. So we’ve also developed tools to put them into action, such as testing AI decisions for fairness and conducting independent human-rights assessments of new products. We have gone even further and made these tools and related open-source code widely available, which will empower others to use AI for good. We believe that any company developing new AI tools should also adopt guiding principles and rigorous review processes.

Government regulation will also play an important role. We don’t have to start from scratch. Existing rules such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation can serve as a strong foundation. Good regulatory frameworks will consider safety, explainability, fairness and accountability to ensure we develop the right tools in the right ways. Sensible regulation must also take a proportionate approach, balancing potential harms, especially in high-risk areas, with social opportunities.

Riaz Haq said...

Eric Schmdt: Computer science in 1970s & ’80s funded by US Government. #Trump now proposing to double funding for #AI and quantum computing for #NationalSecurity. Need to up #biotechnology funding. #Americans Beware of #China Getting Ahead in #technology https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/eric-schmidt-ai-china.html

Many of Silicon Valley’s leaders got their start with grants from the federal government — including me. My graduate work in computer science in the 1970s and ’80s was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But in recent years, Americans — Silicon Valley leaders included — have put too much faith in the private sector to ensure U.S. global leadership in new technology. Now we are in a technology competition with China that has profound ramifications for our economy and defense — a reality I have come to appreciate as chairman of two government panels on innovation and national security. The government needs to get back in the game in a serious way.

Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.

Riaz Haq said...

AI drives driverless trucks being tested right now on public roads
60 Minutes climbs aboard for a look at the very near future of transportation and technology that could eliminate as many as 300,000 jobs, Sunday.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/driverless-trucks-being-tested-on-public-roads-60-minutes-2020-03-13/

Few are aware that driverless 18-wheelers are already on the road. The test runs on highways have humans in them just in case sensors or computers fail, but an autonomous trucking executive says by next year, they won't. The future of freight on America's roads can be a driverless one, this executive says. And that's news to many, especially the truck drivers who stand to lose their livelihoods. 60 Minutes cameras ride aboard a test run and Jon Wertheim reports on the potential disruption to a storied American industry on the next edition of 60 Minutes, Sunday, March 15 at 7 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

"We believe we'll be able to do our first driver-out demonstration runs on public highways in 2021," says Chuck Price, chief product officer at TuSimple, an autonomous trucking firm with operations in the U.S. and China. With a proving ground in Arizona, TuSimple is one of several firms hoping to make billions in an industry that moves over 70% of the nation's goods

Sensors, cameras and radar devices affixed to the rig feed data to the artificial intelligence-driven supercomputer that controls the truck. Price says his product is superior to others. "Our system can see farther than any other autonomous system in the world. We can see forward over a half-mile… day, night and in the rain. And in the rain at night," he says.

Maureen Fitzgerald, a truck driver who works for TuSimple, says the system drives the truck better than she could. "This truck is scanning mirrors, looking 1,000 meters out. It's processing all the things that my brain could never do and it can react 15 times faster than I could," says Fitzgerald.

Steve Viscelli is a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on freight transportation and automation. He says the disruption to the industry will be severe, "I've identified two segments that I think are most at-risk. And that's-- refrigerated and dry van truckload. And those constitute about 200,000 trucking jobs," says Viscelli. "And then what's called line haul and they're somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000-90,000 jobs there."

Truckers 60 Minutes spoke to were understandably wary of the new technology, especially how it will react when a human, such as a police officer, issues commands on the road in an emergency. The companies say they're working on all these scenarios, but won't divulge business secrets. That's a problem for Sam Loesche, a representative for the Teamsters and 600,000 truckers. He thinks there isn't enough federal, state or local government oversight on the new technology. "A lot of this information, understandably, is proprietary. Tech companies want to keep… secret until they can kind of get it right. The problem is that, in the meantime, they're testing this technology… next to you as you drive down the road," Loesche tells Wertheim.

Riaz Haq said...

#Pakistan okays locally developed #AI software that uses chest X-ray to detect #Covid in under a minute. It "shall employ Convolutional Neural Networks to predict [presence of] Covid-19 in suspected individuals" #ArtificialIntelligence #coronavirus https://www.dawn.com/news/1591603

Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (Drap) Chief Executive Officer Asim Rauf on Saturday said the body has granted approval to a locally invented software that can "detect the coronavirus infection in a person's lungs within a minute".

According to the certificate of registration granted by Drap, a copy of which is available with Dawn.com, the Cov-Raid — which has been developed by the National Electronics Complex of Pakistan — "shall employ Convolutional Neural Networks to predict [presence of] Covid-19 in suspected individuals" by using X-rays and it has been approved for "secondary detection" of the virus.

The Cov-raid website says the artificial intelligence (AI) technology was developed by "creating a data repository of chest X-rays (CXR) for Covid-19 or non-Covid-19 detection", adding that the software "requires a chest X-ray image as an input for the detection of Covid-19 positive or negative patients in less than one minute".

"The algorithm has been trained on more than 35,000 CXRs (data authentication done through multiple certified radiologists and PCR reports)," it said.

According to the description posted on the website, the technology "can be path-breaking to conduct screening of a large number of patients in a limited time".

The Drap CEO also said that the device would "greatly help" in the treatment of virus patients.

"This [technology] is available in only a few countries in the world. Pakistan will supply the Cov-raid technology to various countries," he disclosed.

The software will soon be available across the country, he added.

A similar algorithm was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota in the United States last month "that can evaluate chest X-rays to diagnose possible cases of Covid-19 within seconds".

"[The] model learns from thousands of X-rays and detects Covid-19 in seconds, then immediately shows the risk score to providers who are caring for patients," Ju Sun, who led the team, said.

Another such software was developed in China earlier this year by Axial AI which analysed Computed Tomography (CT) imagery in seconds.

Riaz Haq said...

This fall, the National Science Foundation selected The University of Texas at Austin — a world leader in artificial intelligence research — to lead a new, $20 million national institute for machine learning.

Gates Complex Machine Learning Lab

The NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning is another important step in the university’s contributions to AI and tech innovation, and will be housed in a new, permanent base for campus-wide artificial intelligence research: the Machine Learning Laboratory.

Austin-based tech entrepreneurs and UT Austin alumni Zaib and Amir Husain, BBA ’99 and B.S. ’98, have given $5 million to launch the Machine Learning Laboratory, which will provide a hub for collaboration among faculty, researchers, and students from across UT. Their gift will provide permanent support for the students, faculty and groundbreaking work centered there.

“UT’s strengths in computer science, engineering, public policy, business, and law can help drive applications of AI,” Amir Husain said. “And Austin’s booming tech scene is destined to be a major driver for the local and national economy for decades to come.”

----------

Amir Husain Is Building the Future of A.I.
BY
DINAH ENG

https://fortune.com/2019/02/19/amir-husain-is-building-the-future-of-a-i/

Amir Husain’s Austin-based SparkCognition is working on the future of A.I., covering everything from the battlefield to power plants. A boy from Pakistan who fell in love with computers at age 4, Husain is now a founding member of the board of advisers for IBM Watson and a prolific inventor, with 27 U.S. patents awarded and many more pending.

I grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, where my father was a businessman and an investor, and my mother was an educator. When I was 4 years old, I had my first -experience with a computer: a Commodore 64. It blew my mind that you could control what showed up on the screen. Afterward, I went to my room, grabbed some toys, disassembled them, added cardboard, and made a contraption that I called a computer. My mom knew then that I was hooked.

Riaz Haq said...

#Pakistani #Tech firm offers #AI to Middle Eastern growers. The #startup has developed a portable machine that uses AI to grade fruits, vegetables and dates. #ArtificialIntelligence #technology #Horticulture https://www.freshplaza.com/article/9271453/pakistan-tech-firm-offers-ai-tech-to-middle-eastern-growers/#.X8Gofbg9W54.twitter


Pakistani agritech firm Industrial Vision Systems is intent on selling its Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology for scanning and grading fruits and vegetables to farmers in Jordan, UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The start-up has developed a portable machine that uses AI to grade fruits, vegetables and dates. First it scans them through a camera which is connected to a computer, and then grades them by identifying their defects and creating a complete dataset on the basis of their quality.

The tech should benefit both farmers and the agriculture industry in Pakistan by enhancing export earnings and modernizing agricultural practices in the country. Being developed in Pakistan, this AI machine is also a cost effective solution to Pakistani farmers' many needs.

CEO and Co-founder of Industrial Vision Systems, Saad Tanveer Ahmed, says that the firm is engaging with farmers in several Middle Eastern countries with hopes to sell the technology there. This AI machine will help date farmers in the Middle East by allowing them to grade their dates without human shortcomings and high labor costs.

Ahmed said...


Dear Sir Riaz

Thanks for this post, Sir, I was reading an article in which it said that in 2018 Indian government made a national policy for Artificial Intelligence and they are working on it.

The question is that has Pakistani government made any national policy for Artificial Intelligence? How will AI be promoted in the country if the government of Pakistan will not make a policy for it?Do you really think Pakistan needs a national policy at government level to promote AI in the country?

Can you pls throw some light on this?

Regards,

Ahmed said...


Dear Sir Riaz

I hope you are doing well, Sir I was reading a post on your blog regarding "AFINITY" which is an American based AI company which was founded by a Pakistani. As you said that this AI based company is working on different millitary projects in America.

Sir don't you think that you and other high-profile Pakistanis must contact this founder of AFINITY" and cooperate with him and persuade him to invest in the Research and Development of AI in Pakistani Universities?

Sir I was reading an article written by a Pakistani author and he said that Pakistan is lagging behind in R&D(Research and Development) ,so how can we make progress in entire South Asia in AI if we are lagging behind in Research?

Sir kindly can you take this message of mine seriously and work on this?

Riaz Haq said...

Ahmad: "I hope you are doing well, Sir I was reading a post on your blog regarding "AFINITY" which is an American based AI company which was founded by a Pakistani. As you said that this AI based company is working on different millitary projects in America"


No, I didn't say that Afiniti is working on Defense AI.

There's another AI company called SparkCognition that was founded by a Pakistani that is focused on Defense AI. Please read this: https://www.riazhaq.com/2020/11/pakistani-american-starts-defense.html

Riaz Haq said...

Advising the students, President Dr Arif Alvi said that they should work hard and focus on IT education in the country and once they have completed, they would avail thousands of opportunities in this sector across the world. The President expressed such view while addressing the Presidential Initiative Artificial Intelligence and Computing (PIAIC) Grand Entrance Test 2022 organized by Saylani Welfare International Trust (SWIT) here at National Stadium on Sunday.

https://dailytimes.com.pk/889120/thousands-of-opportunities-available-in-it-sector-alvi/

There is a need of 8 crore of people having expertise in IT sector across the world, the President told, saying that you would not have job opportunities but entrepreneurship opportunities. The government is extending all kinds of support to IT sector and the laws have been made to facilitate the growth of this sector, he informed.

President Arif Alvi mentioned that besides, the government had initiated some programs like Digital Skill Program which was free and imparting the IT education through online classes and thousands of students had got benefits from this program and were earning in dollars.



After completing your training or education in IT sector, you might need the financial support to start entrepreneurship, he uttered and suggested that you don’t need to worry because the government has also launched Kamayab Jawan Program (KJP) to extend the financial support up to Rs.10 lacs.

Financial facility under KJP is very easy to avail and it is interest-free, Arif Alvi elaborated. In addition, the government has opened the way for foreign investors and China wants to invest in Pakistani IT industry. He further added that the youth of Pakistan were striving for knowledge and this was a changing Pakistan. So let the youth forget other things and young people should only focus on their training and education, he mentioned.

Highlighting the achievements of Pakistan Tahreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led government in the province, the President said that no polio case has been reported in the last year and it is because the government has taken some initiatives to control it.


Talking on the issues being faced by refugees across the world, the President told that the refugees had to suffer a lot because they were not allowed to enter the different countries but it was only Pakistan which allowed 40 lac Afghan refugees living there for the last 40 years. Speaking on the occasion, Chairman SWIT Maulana Bashir Ahmed Farooqui said that the main object of SWIT was to serve the people and the Trust was trying to do its best to support each person in the country.

In the education, we are working to train the youth in IT sector as it can help develop the country through promoting the entrepreneurship in the country. The representative of Presidential Initiative Artificial Intelligence and Computing (PIAIC) Zia Ullah Khan also spoke on the occasion and highlighted the importance of IT sector. More than 25000 students from different parts of Sindh province participated in the Presidential Initiative Artificial Intelligence and Computing (PIAIC) Grand Entrance Test 2022.


Riaz Haq said...

Does the advent of machine learning mean the classic methodology of hypothesise, predict and test has had its day?

by Laura Spinney

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/09/are-we-witnessing-the-dawn-of-post-theory-science


Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Much experimentation and data analysis later, he realised there was a fundamental relationship between force, mass and acceleration. He formulated a theory to describe that relationship – one that could be expressed as an equation, F=ma – and used it to predict the behaviour of objects other than apples. His predictions turned out to be right (if not always precise enough for those who came later).

Contrast how science is increasingly done today. Facebook’s machine learning tools predict your preferences better than any psychologist. AlphaFold, a program built by DeepMind, has produced the most accurate predictions yet of protein structures based on the amino acids they contain. Both are completely silent on why they work: why you prefer this or that information; why this sequence generates that structure.

You can’t lift a curtain and peer into the mechanism. They offer up no explanation, no set of rules for converting this into that – no theory, in a word. They just work and do so well. We witness the social effects of Facebook’s predictions daily. AlphaFold has yet to make its impact felt, but many are convinced it will change medicine.

Somewhere between Newton and Mark Zuckerberg, theory took a back seat. In 2008, Chris Anderson, the then editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, predicted its demise. So much data had accumulated, he argued, and computers were already so much better than us at finding relationships within it, that our theories were being exposed for what they were – oversimplifications of reality. Soon, the old scientific method – hypothesise, predict, test – would be relegated to the dustbin of history. We’d stop looking for the causes of things and be satisfied with correlations.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that what Anderson saw is true (he wasn’t alone). The complexity that this wealth of data has revealed to us cannot be captured by theory as traditionally understood. “We have leapfrogged over our ability to even write the theories that are going to be useful for description,” says computational neuroscientist Peter Dayan, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. “We don’t even know what they would look like.”

But Anderson’s prediction of the end of theory looks to have been premature – or maybe his thesis was itself an oversimplification. There are several reasons why theory refuses to die, despite the successes of such theory-free prediction engines as Facebook and AlphaFold. All are illuminating, because they force us to ask: what’s the best way to acquire knowledge and where does science go from here?

The first reason is that we’ve realised that artificial intelligences (AIs), particularly a form of machine learning called neural networks, which learn from data without having to be fed explicit instructions, are themselves fallible. Think of the prejudice that has been documented in Google’s search engines and Amazon’s hiring tools.

The second is that humans turn out to be deeply uncomfortable with theory-free science. We don’t like dealing with a black box – we want to know why.

And third, there may still be plenty of theory of the traditional kind – that is, graspable by humans – that usefully explains much but has yet to be uncovered.

----------

In 2022, therefore, there is almost no stage of the scientific process where AI hasn’t left its footprint. And the more we draw it into our quest for knowledge, the more it changes that quest. We’ll have to learn to live with that, but we can reassure ourselves about one thing: we’re still asking the questions. As Pablo Picasso put it in the 1960s, “computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”

Riaz Haq said...

During a seminar titled ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Defence Market: A Paradigm Shift in Military Strategy and National Security’ as part of IDEAS-22, artificial intelligence (AI) experts underscored the essential role of universities to keep Pakistan abreast with advancements in this field.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/2386761/one-network-catches-the-eye-at-ideas-22

The seminar was orgnaised by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), Islamabad, and the Defence Export Promotion Organization (DEPO), where Minister for Defence Production Israr Tareen was the chief guest, said a press release issued here.

Addressing the seminar, Tareen acknowledged the country’s progress in the industrial and defence sectors, driven by the AI and machine learning (ML). He also underscored the role of academia, research scholars, and data-savvy individuals in the development process.

“Pakistan can become a global hub for AI, data science, cloud-native computing, edge computing, block-chain, augmented reality, and the IoT by reshaping and revolutionising education, businesses, and research through adoption of cutting-edge technologies and the AI-driven applications,” he said.

He emphasised that the country’s talented youth should be provided opportunities in the field of the AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution [Industry 4.0] through initiatives like the Presidential Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Computing (PIAIC).

“Apart from social, political, and economic changes, advanced technologies, 5G, and the AI have also changed the whole dynamics of contemporary warfare, battlefields, tactics, and strategies, the minister told the participants.

“With such strategic shifts, the concept of security has widened beyond conventional terms and rudimentary procedures to include sophisticated mechanisms and technology-driven procedures. These pose new challenges to the states,” he said.

IPS Chairman Khalid Rahman, who delivered the introductory remarks, highlighted the role of human intellect and research in the process of development. “In this regard, universities have served as the key platforms to set the pace for humanity in the key areas,” he said.

“The progress in AI will not stop and no country should stay behind in the AI development,” he emphasised. The role in AI progress is essentially played by universities, where research, creativity, and collaboration … can not only capitalise on the potentials of AI but also deal with the challenges.”

To meet the new complex security challenges of the 21st century, the other speakers presented their research papers, ideas, and findings on different AI-driven applications and processes, upon which the future international security dynamics depend.

Lt-Colonel Dr Ghulam Murtaza, Dr Yasar Ayaz, Dr Muhammad Tayab Ali, Maj Aon Safdar, Dr Waleed Bin Shahid, Lt-Col Usman Zia and Sqn-Ldr Javeria Farooq also addressed the seminar. The session was followed by a discussion by the panel.

Riaz Haq said...

What is ChatGPT? The AI chatbot talked up as a potential Google killer
After all, the AI chatbot seems to be slaying a great deal of search engine responses.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-google-killer

ChatGPT is the latest and most impressive artificially intelligent chatbot yet. It was released two weeks ago, and in just five days hit a million users. It’s being used so much that its servers have reached capacity several times.

OpenAI, the company that developed it, is already being discussed as a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer? (There’s even a Chrome extension that lets you do both, side by side.)

But what if we never know the secret sauce behind ChatGPT’s capabilities?

The chatbot takes advantage of a number of technical advances published in the open scientific literature in the past couple of decades. But any innovations unique to it are secret. OpenAI could well be trying to build a technical and business moat to keep others out.

What it can (and can’t do)
ChatGPT is very capable. Want a haiku on chatbots? Sure.

How about a joke about chatbots? No problem.

ChatGPT can do many other tricks. It can write computer code to a user’s specifications, draft business letters or rental contracts, compose homework essays and even pass university exams.

Just as important is what ChatGPT can’t do. For instance, it struggles to distinguish between truth and falsehood. It is also often a persuasive liar.

ChatGPT is a bit like autocomplete on your phone. Your phone is trained on a dictionary of words so it completes words. ChatGPT is trained on pretty much all of the web, and can therefore complete whole sentences – or even whole paragraphs.

However, it doesn’t understand what it’s saying, just what words are most likely to come next.

Open only by name
In the past, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have been accompanied by peer-reviewed literature.

In 2018, for example, when the Google Brain team developed the BERT neural network on which most natural language processing systems are now based (and we suspect ChatGPT is too), the methods were published in peer-reviewed scientific papers, and the code was open-sourced.

And in 2021, DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2, a protein-folding software, was Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. The software and its results were open-sourced so scientists everywhere could use them to advance biology and medicine.

Following the release of ChatGPT, we have only a short blog post describing how it works. There has been no hint of an accompanying scientific publication, or that the code will be open-sourced.

To understand why ChatGPT could be kept secret, you have to understand a little about the company behind it.

OpenAI is perhaps one of the oddest companies to emerge from Silicon Valley. It was set up as a non-profit in 2015 to promote and develop “friendly” AI in a way that “benefits humanity as a whole”. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other leading tech figures pledged US$1 billion (dollars) towards its goals.

Their thinking was we couldn’t trust for-profit companies to develop increasingly capable AI that aligned with humanity’s prosperity. AI therefore needed to be developed by a non-profit and, as the name suggested, in an open way.

In 2019 OpenAI transitioned into a capped for-profit company (with investors limited to a maximum return of 100 times their investment) and took a US$1 billion(dollars) investment from Microsoft so it could scale and compete with the tech giants.

It seems money got in the way of OpenAI’s initial plans for openness.

Profiting from users
On top of this, OpenAI appears to be using feedback from users to filter out the fake answers ChatGPT hallucinates.

According to its blog, OpenAI initially used reinforcement learning in ChatGPT to downrank fake and/or problematic answers using a costly hand-constructed training set.

Riaz Haq said...

Why do your homework when a chatbot can do it for you? A new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT has thrilled the Internet with its superhuman abilities to solve math problems, churn out college essays and write research papers.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/19/1143912956/chatgpt-ai-chatbot-homework-academia

After the developer OpenAI released the text-based system to the public last month, some educators have been sounding the alarm about the potential that such AI systems have to transform academia, for better and worse.

"AI has basically ruined homework," said Ethan Mollick, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, on Twitter.

The tool has been an instant hit among many of his students, he told NPR in an interview on Morning Edition, with its most immediately obvious use being a way to cheat by plagiarizing the AI-written work, he said.

Academic fraud aside, Mollick also sees its benefits as a learning companion.

He's used it as his own teacher's assistant, for help with crafting a syllabus, lecture, an assignment and a grading rubric for MBA students.

"You can paste in entire academic papers and ask it to summarize it. You can ask it to find an error in your code and correct it and tell you why you got it wrong," he said. "It's this multiplier of ability, that I think we are not quite getting our heads around, that is absolutely stunning," he said.

A convincing — yet untrustworthy — bot
But the superhuman virtual assistant — like any emerging AI tech — has its limitations. ChatGPT was created by humans, after all. OpenAI has trained the tool using a large dataset of real human conversations.

"The best way to think about this is you are chatting with an omniscient, eager-to-please intern who sometimes lies to you," Mollick said.

It lies with confidence, too. Despite its authoritative tone, there have been instances in which ChatGPT won't tell you when it doesn't have the answer.

That's what Teresa Kubacka, a data scientist based in Zurich, Switzerland, found when she experimented with the language model. Kubacka, who studied physics for her Ph.D., tested the tool by asking it about a made-up physical phenomenon.

"I deliberately asked it about something that I thought that I know doesn't exist so that they can judge whether it actually also has the notion of what exists and what doesn't exist," she said.

ChatGPT produced an answer so specific and plausible sounding, backed with citations, she said, that she had to investigate whether the fake phenomenon, "a cycloidal inverted electromagnon," was actually real.

When she looked closer, the alleged source material was also bogus, she said. There were names of well-known physics experts listed – the titles of the publications they supposedly authored, however, were non-existent, she said.

"This is where it becomes kind of dangerous," Kubacka said. "The moment that you cannot trust the references, it also kind of erodes the trust in citing science whatsoever," she said.

Scientists call these fake generations "hallucinations."

"There are still many cases where you ask it a question and it'll give you a very impressive-sounding answer that's just dead wrong," said Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, who ran the research nonprofit until recently. "And, of course, that's a problem if you don't carefully verify or corroborate its facts."

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

Thanks for this information ,

you said :
Drone is an example of artificial intelligence application.

My comment :

Sir I am sorry but are you sure that drone is actually based on AI technology ? As far as I know most of the drones are actually controlled by central control units specially in the millitary where they have screens in which they monitor the flight of drone planes and see where it goes and even try to control it .

Also sir I think of drones are based on the AI technology then drones will have their own decision making power because AI actually generates thinking capabilities in any device or machine and this way drones will become independent . They will be able to perform tasks based on their decision making .

So it won’t be possible to control when any device or machine becomes independent .

I hope my questions are clear

Can you pls reply ?

Thanks

Ahmed said...

Dear Sir

Thanks for the information , open AI is a research center or laboratory based in America and the computer scientists and computer engineers are doing research their on AI technology . They are actually working on AI to find and see how AI can be made beneficial for people in different areas and fields .

Ahmed said...

Sir and members of this blog

Artificial intelligence is a kind of advance technology which can be applied in different fields . It can also be applied in agriculture , business , medical science and etc .

Robots and machines based on AI can be designed and developed that can help the farmers in cultivation of the agricultural lands .

Also robots and machines based on AI can be developed that can help doctors and surgeon in treating patients in hospitals .

Riaz Haq said...

The rocky road ahead for Pakistan’s start-up ecosystem | fDi Intelligence – Your source for foreign direct investment information - fDiIntelligence.com

https://www.fdiintelligence.com/content/feature/the-rocky-road-ahead-for-pakistans-startup-ecosystem-81994

Alex Irwin-Hunt
February 22, 2023

Based out of the NED University of Engineering and Technology, NIC Karachi is funded by Pakistan’s national technology fund, Ignite, and operated by LMKT, a private tech company which runs two other NICs in the cities of Hyderabad and Peshawar.

Atif Khan, the chairman and CEO of LMKT, says the philosophy behind the incubation centres “was not to create unicorns”, but to act as digital skills development centres: “We are training and grooming a lot of talent in the country.”

NIC Karachi has already incubated more than 250 start-ups, such as ride-hailing app Bykea and London-based proptech platform Gridizen. Kamran Mahmood, the CEO of Gridizen, who recently returned to Pakistan to join NIC Karachi, says he has found it even easier to meet decision makers at large companies in Pakistan than the UK.

“[NIC Karachi] is doing an excellent job of internationalising and progressing the start-up scene in the country,” he says. Data Darbar figures show that Karachi-based start-ups attracted $236.7m of funding in 2022, equivalent to two-thirds of Pakistan's total and almost double the previous year. The financial capital is followed by Lahore ($69.2m) and Islamabad ($41.6m).

-------------------------

In July 2022, Pakistan’s fledgling start-up scene was dealt a major blow. Airlift, a fast delivery start-up that had raised $85m barely a year earlier, said it would permanently close operations due to the “devastating impact” of worsening economic conditions.

“This has been an extremely taxing decision that impacts a large set of stakeholders and an emerging technology ecosystem,” Airlift wrote in a statement. Start-up failures are common in more mature markets, and seen as an integral part of the innovation and disruption process. But the collapse of a company hoped to be Pakistan’s first ‘unicorn’, or start-up valued at above $1bn, rattled the country’s nascent tech scene.

Several advisors, investors and entrepreneurs tell fDi that Airlift’s failure has caused Pakistani start-up founders and investors to shift their focus away from pursuing “hyper-growth” to building more “sustainable” business models.

Similar to the caution permeating the global tech and venture capital (VC) industry, start-up funding in Pakistan has dropped considerably. Start-ups in Pakistan raised just over $15m in the final quarter of 2022, the worst volumes since the first quarter of 2020 and 79% lower than the same period a year earlier, according to Data Darbar, which tracks the Pakistani start-up scene.

“Given the global slowdown and Pakistan’s macroeconomic and political challenges, things are tough right now and will likely remain so in 2023,” says Aatif Awan, the founder of early stage venture fund Indus Valley Capital, which is focused on Pakistan and had invested in Airlift.

Several acute challenges currently facing the country — including dwindling foreign exchange reserves, security issues, blackouts and severe flood risks — are causing many young Pakistanis to leave. Despite significant obstacles, those involved in Pakistan’s ecosystem believe that the country’s demographics and rapidly digitalising economy make it an untapped opportunity with potential for long-term growth.

Democratising technology

When Shamim Rajani co-founded her software development business Genetech Solutions in Pakistan’s commercial capital Karachi back in 2004, she remembers a “lot of stubbornness” from the government and local corporates towards the IT sector.

“Pakistan wasn’t [even] ready for women CEOs in the tech sector then,” remarks Ms Rajani, adding that she had to look for global clients in countries like the US. “Saying these words today, I don’t even believe it myself.”

Riaz Haq said...

Top Artificial Intelligence Companies in Pakistan

https://clutch.co/pk/developers/artificial-intelligence

Riaz Haq said...

The Godfather of #AI Leaves #Google, Warns of #Danger Ahead. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things”. Google bought a company started by Dr. Hinton that led to creation #ChatGPT & Google #Bard. #technology
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare


In the 1980s, Dr. Hinton was a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, but left the university for Canada because he said he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. At the time, most A.I. research in the United States was funded by the Defense Department. Dr. Hinton is deeply opposed to the use of artificial intelligence on the battlefield — what he calls “robot soldiers.”

In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.


Google spent $44 million to acquire a company started by Dr. Hinton and his two students. And their system led to the creation of increasingly powerful technologies, including new chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard. Mr. Sutskever went on to become chief scientist at OpenAI. In 2018, Dr. Hinton and two other longtime collaborators received the Turing Award, often called “the Nobel Prize of computing,” for their work on neural networks.

Around the same time, Google, OpenAI and other companies began building neural networks that learned from huge amounts of digital text. Dr. Hinton thought it was a powerful way for machines to understand and generate language, but it was inferior to the way humans handled language.

Then, last year, as Google and OpenAI built systems using much larger amounts of data, his view changed. He still believed the systems were inferior to the human brain in some ways but he thought they were eclipsing human intelligence in others. “Maybe what is going on in these systems,” he said, “is actually a lot better than what is going on in the brain.”

As companies improve their A.I. systems, he believes, they become increasingly dangerous. “Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he said of A.I. technology. “Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”

Until last year, he said, Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology, careful not to release something that might cause harm. But now that Microsoft has augmented its Bing search engine with a chatbot — challenging Google’s core business — Google is racing to deploy the same kind of technology. The tech giants are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, Dr. Hinton said.

His immediate concern is that the internet will be flooded with false photos, videos and text, and the average person will “not be able to know what is true anymore.”

He is also worried that A.I. technologies will in time upend the job market. Today, chatbots like ChatGPT tend to complement human workers, but they could replace paralegals, personal assistants, translators and others who handle rote tasks. “It takes away the drudge work,” he said. “It might take away more than that.”

Down the road, he is worried that future versions of the technology pose a threat to humanity because they often learn unexpected behavior from the vast amounts of data they analyze. This becomes an issue, he said, as individuals and companies allow A.I. systems not only to generate their own computer code but actually run that code on their own. And he fears a day when truly autonomous weapons — those killer robots — become reality.

“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”

Riaz Haq said...

Factbox: Governments race to regulate AI tools

https://www.reuters.com/technology/governments-efforts-regulate-ai-tools-2023-04-12/

April 14 (Reuters) - Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT are complicating governments' efforts to agree laws governing the use of the technology.

Here are the latest steps national and international governing bodies are taking to regulate AI tools:

AUSTRALIA
* Seeking input on regulations

The government is consulting Australia's main science advisory body and is considering next steps, a spokesperson for the industry and science minister said in April.

BRITAIN
* Planning regulations

Britain's competition regulator said on Thursday it would start examining the impact of AI on consumers, businesses and the economy and whether new controls were needed.

Britain said in March it planned to split responsibility for governing AI between its regulators for human rights, health and safety, and competition, rather than creating a new body.

CHINA
* Planning regulations

China's cyberspace regulator in April unveiled draft measures to manage generative AI services, saying it wanted firms to submit security assessments to authorities before they launch offerings to the public.

Beijing will support leading enterprises in building AI models that can challenge ChatGPT, its economy and information technology bureau said in February.

EUROPEAN UNION
* Planning regulations

Members of the European Parliament reached a preliminary deal on the draft of the EU's Artificial Intelligence Act, that could pave the way for the world's first comprehensive laws governing the technology.

The draft, which will be voted by a committee of lawmakers on May 11, identified copyright protection as central to the effort to keep AI in check.

Members of European Parliament raced to update the rules to catch up with an explosion of interest in generative AI, Reuters interviews with four lawmakers and two other sources found.

The European Data Protection Board, which unites Europe's national privacy watchdogs, said in April it had set up a task force on ChatGPT, a potentially important first step towards a common policy on setting privacy rules on AI. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) has joined in the concern about ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, calling on EU consumer protection agencies to investigate the technology and the potential harm to individuals.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan aims to produce 1M AI-trained IT graduates by 2027

The policy framework showcases Pakistan’s willingness to integrate AI for public and national betterment. The country has set 15 targets with timelines ranging from 2023 to 2028.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/pakistan-aims-to-produce-1-million-ai-trained-it-graduates-by-2027


Just days after announcing that cryptocurrencies will “never be legalized” in the country, Pakistan’s Ministry of IT & Telecom drafted a policy to spur the growth of artificial intelligence.


With the national AI policy, Pakistan aims to evolve into a knowledge-based economy by upskilling human capital on AI and allied technologies, among other investments and initiatives.

The policy framework showcases Pakistan’s willingness to integrate AI for public and national betterment. The country has set 15 targets with timelines ranging from 2023 to 2028. To support these initiatives, Pakistan intends to establish a National AI Fund by using the Ministry of IT & Telecom’s “underutilized resources and funds.”

b533606e-360f-4833-b764-47aa2bc4901c.png

A snippet of Pakistan's national AI policy draft. Source: Ministry of IT & Telecom
Some of the intended use cases for AI in Pakistan include predicting the weather, agriculture supply chain optimization and health services transformation, to name a few.

The Pakistani government has taken an inclusive approach toward building AI policies as it remains open to feedback from the general public until June 16.

The primary reason for Pakistan’s ban on cryptocurrencies was due to the requirements set by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). In return, the country remains excluded from FATF’s gray list.

As Cointelegraph previously reported, while FATF does not have the authority to impose sanctions on non-compliant countries, it can likely influence government and corporate policies worldwide.

By complying with FATF, Pakistan holds a higher possibility of getting a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.

Riaz Haq said...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: Pretty Hopeless for Indian Companies to Try and Compete with them

https://indianyug.com/openai-ceo-sam-altman-pretty-hopeless-for-indian-companies-to-try-and-compete-with-them/

Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT, expressed his belief that India’s attempt to develop a foundational AI model similar to ChatGPT may not be worth pursuing.

CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT Sam Altman was in India for the last couple of days. His visit was concentrated broadly on the way forward and regulation in the area of artificial intelligence (AI).

Meeting with the students of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi on Thursday, June 8, 2023, for a one-on-one session with Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi, the 38-year-old techie’s emphasis was on the AI tool.

During his visit to India, Sam Altman’s one statement captured the attention of Indians, coinciding with the country’s efforts to formulate AI regulations under the Digital India Bill. The bill, which has been in progress since the previous year, signifies the timing of Altman’s visit.

Sam Altman claimed that Indians would be “totally hopeless” if they attempted to develop something akin to ChatGPT.

This observation gained widespread attention, particularly considering the challenges that tech enthusiasts often face in the country.

Altman’s remarks about the difficulty of freely expressing opinions without taking responsibility for their accuracy among Indian techies sparked a viral response on social media soon after he made them.

Riaz Haq said...

In terms of number of AI (Artificial Intelligence) research publications from 2016-2020, China tops with 76,300 papers followed by US second with 44,400, India ranks 3rd with 27,000. Pakistan ranks 28th with 2,600 papers.


https://www.statista.com/statistics/939627/ai-publications-worldwide-by-country/

Riaz Haq said...

Evolution of AI’s Significance in Pakistan

https://cscr.pk/explore/themes/politics-governance/pakistans-draft-national-ai-policy-is-a-hodgepodge-of-technospeak/

The hype around Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased over the past decade, but in Pakistan, this began gaining momentum around 2017 onward. It began with a few opinion pieces in institutional publications calling for the securitisation of AI against “hybrid war” to proper governmental initiatives by two different political governments. Near the very end of its tenure in mid-2018, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) government led then by Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, inaugurated a National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) at the National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), followed by a Rs 1.1bn budgetary allocation for select universities (mostly in Punjab and Islamabad, one in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Sindh each); most importantly, NUST was declared as the headquarters from where these research and development (R&D) efforts on AI would be coordinated.

A month later (May 2018), the succeeding federal government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by then Prime Minister Imran Khan, approved the Digital Pakistan Policy. This was the first high-level government policy to lay out a plan to set up innovation centres in different thematic areas across the provincial capitals and minor/auxiliary cities, which included AI as a special focus area. The year concluded with the President of Pakistan Dr Arif Alvi, himself a former PTI leader, ambitiously declaring his own Presidential Initiative for Artificial Intelligence & Computing (PIAIC).

On the practical side, it is a rudderless policy driven more by utopian ideals instead of factual appreciation of strengths and weaknesses.

Two years later (during the PTI government) in 2020, Pakistan Air Force (PAF) took the lead in setting up a Centre of Artificial Intelligence and Computing (CENTAIC). The next year (2021), PAF also inaugurated a Cyber Security Academy within Air University, during which the Air Force’s C4I lead also announced the intent to set up an Air Force Cyber Command.

Shortly after the deposition of the PTI government by the incumbent Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) alliance in the first half of 2022, the budget was approved to set up a Sino-Pak Centre for Artificial Intelligence (SPCAI) at the Pak-Austria Fachhochschule: Institute of Applied Sciences and Technology (PAF-IAST) in Haripur, which purportedly collaborates through linkages with academia and industries in Austria and China. Also, in the same year, the Pakistan Army announced the inauguration of its Cyber Command, which reportedly consists of two divisions, one of which (the Army Centre of Emerging Technologies) is reasonably believed to include AI in its focus areas.

The incumbent PDM government, through the Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives, had reportedly constituted a 15-member National Task Force (NTF) on Artificial Intelligence with the purported objective of supporting national development, even before the draft policy was published. The dichotomy is mind-boggling since MoITT has the primary mandate of supervising ICT-related initiatives.

Ignoring the Elephants in the Room

The authors of the draft National AI Policy are surprisingly oblivious or intentionally ignorant of major obstacles to its proper appreciation and implementation (adoption).

Riaz Haq said...

Good news for Pakistani students as Google offers 45,000 AI Scholarships

https://pakobserver.net/good-news-for-pakistani-students-as-google-offers-45000-ai-scholarships/

ISLAMABAD – Search engine Google has been actively involved in supporting AI education in Pakistan, offering courses for students to learn about Artificial Intelligence, and now the tech giant comes with Google AI Essentials.

Google AI Essentials course for Pakistani students aimed at helping more individuals to learn latest AI skills.

The course will help beginners with no prior AI experience, offering much needed skills to enhance productivity and providing hands-on practice with various AI tools.

Google AI Course in Pakistan
At least 45,000 scholarships for Google Career Certificates are up for grabs. Google AI Essentials is available on Coursera in English and aims to teach people how to utilize AI tools to generate ideas and expedite daily tasks.

Students will help write effective prompts and use AI responsibly by recognizing potential biases. The Google Career Certificates (GCC) prepare learners for entry-level jobs in fields like Data Analytics, Cybersecurity, or Digital Marketing, providing new resources to help learners understand how professionals use AI in their fields and gain practical experience in applying AI to workplace scenarios.

In joint with Pakistan Freelancers Association (PAFLA), Google launched several programs to assist freelancers in the fifth most populated nation in enhancing their skills.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan Ranks 4th in the World in Chat GPT Awareness Index 2024

An AI Opportunity Agenda for Pakistan

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/publicpolicy.google/en//resources/pakistan_ai_opportunity_agenda_en.pdf

If we want to fully harness AI’s transformative potential, we must focus our attention on what we want to achieve, not just what we want to avoid.
In this respect, Pakistan’s 2023 draft National AI Policy (Draft AI Policy) is commendable. It clearly demonstrates the Pakistan government’s appreciation of how AI can help the country sustain its national competitiveness and improve the lives of its citizens by outlining a wide range of developmental initiatives necessary for awareness and adoption of AI, reimagining the transparent and fair use of personal data using AI, and stimulating innovation through industry-academia collaborations and investments in AI-led initiatives.
AI awareness is rising among Pakistan’s general public. The country ranks fourth with 76% of people being aware of ChatGPT, according to Stanford University’s AI Index Report 2024.
Pakistan has also seen several private-sector led initiatives to create even more awareness of AI. For instance, Karachi.AI is recognized as a premier community for Applied AI practitioners. Established in 2017, the community proudly hosts over 10,000 members representing various domains. Its mission revolves around three central pillars: raising awareness, promoting engagement, and driving execution. Karachi. AI hosts regular meetups in Karachi, which are also live streamed on its YouTube channel, along with other educational content about AI.