Webinar: Artificial Intelligence Technologies
Good morning and good afternoon to the Australia UAE Business Council members and our guests. My name is Ellecia Saffron and I’m an advisory board member for the AUSUAE Business Council which was launched in 2020. Today's event is on artificial intelligence, it's our third webinar of the group and we have three fantastic panellists that will be speaking with us today about all things AI. The first speaker will be Mr Daniel Keys from Xamplify
and we are also joined by Mr Talal Al Kaissi from G42 Cloud and Mr Keith Strier hopefully will be joining us from NVIDIA. For today's session first of all though I’d like to welcome HE Mr Badr Al-Olama who is the Co-Chair of the AUSUAE Business Council who's representing him and Mr Christopher Pyne today to welcome participants and guests. Thank you, good morning everyone welcome to this webinar. I’m very pleased that you found some time to join us it's obviously a very important topic everyone around the world is talking about the importance of technology and the importance of artificial intelligence. In the UAE itself we have a Minister for AI demonstrating the importance that the UAE is placing on the artificial intelligence sector and in essence this webinar is the result of us at the Australia UAE Business Council deciding on forming a working group to advance artificial intelligence technologies; a working group that will work over the next 12 months to explore opportunities between the members and hopefully present these opportunities and any challenges associated in terms of progressing business government policy type of partnership and collaboration between Australia and the United Arab Emirates. I’d like to say that both Australia and the UAE share the same vision and belief in the pivotal role of technology we believe that AI or artificial intelligence is at the heart of these transformative technologies and if deployed wisely it could breed a lot of social business and government and governance benefits to our nations.
I hope you enjoy these discussions and I’d like to welcome our panellists, both Daniel and Talal for those of you that are going to be hearing from them I’m quite excited because I’ve known Talal for quite some time he is extremely passionate about technology but more so more importantly so he represents one of the most important companies in the UAE that is actually championing technology which is Group 42 or G42. Over to you Ellie. Thank you for giving us this opportunity to actually share the welcome and also share some information about G42 to our members. Thank you Your Excellency and so I’d like to introduce firstly, Mr Daniel Keys who is the Head of Futures and Innovation at Xamplify he has over 25 years’ experience in ICT delivery and has held senior digital and ICT leadership roles at the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, Digital Transformation Agency and the Australian Tax Office. Before joining the Australian Government, Daniel held leadership roles in a number of private sector companies and established a small ICT consultancy specializing in ICT strategy and architecture. However, today he's known as an inspirational leader of large digital transformation programs and he's most recently served as Chief Information Officer at the Commonwealth Department of Health leading the delivery of many solutions in response to the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Hi Daniel. Thank you very much Ellie for the introduction and thanks to all the panellists
and all the webinar guests for joining us. Look we're really excited here at Xamplify to be a part of the Australia UAE Business Council and we just I guess like to offer an Australian perspective of what we're seeing with regards to artificial intelligence. I thought I’d touch on a few different aspects of what we see here in Australia the first one being awareness of artificial intelligence and its maturity within various different sectors. We see some sectors such as our mining sector embracing and really driving change using artificial intelligence but on the whole in Australia, we see a real lag of sort of adoption of sort of modern artificial intelligence capabilities within solutions and I think at the core of that is that people really don't understand the sort of practical implications of AI in business and how to transform their businesses. It sounds complicated, it sounds dangerous, and people don't understand where the benefits are and really struggle to see the real value. I think there's a lack in Australia of real resounding success stories and we've also really got a lack of really tangible return on investment metrics that can be used to justify an investment as significant investment in artificial intelligence. So, I think
that on the whole there's really quite a lack of awareness and there's a lot of work that we need to do within Australia to educate not just the technical people but senior leaders business leaders and also the community on the use, the ethical and safe use of artificial intelligence and the way that it can change the way we live our lives. What we are seeing for example Australia’s lead artificial intelligence integrator, we are seeing an emerging demand around four key themes of artificial intelligence in Australia. The first one is around object detection so real time object recognition. You know leveraging
some innovative technologies we have in Australia that are providing a plug-and-play type platform that allow you to pick up different recognition technologies and use them for real-time alerting and monitoring of primarily law enforcement and national security use cases. That's quite an easy use case for people to understand because, you know, there's an instant way to, I guess, validate that return on investment and the value proposition that's associated with something that's done quite a traditional and manual process into an automated artificial intelligence engine. It's quite a tangible thing, so people are embracing that the second sort of area is really around natural language processing and it's primarily being used at the moment in service delivery and in integrated knowledge management and really I think the use case that's being embraced the most within Australia is multi-language speech to text and some of that automated you know document discovery sentiment analysis and those types of natural language processes we've seen a push also in Australia around the delivery of digital twins so using you know digital representations of physical systems to try and drive new insights and intelligent operations and there's quite an innovative company in Australia called green gravity who are doing, they're basically an innovative Australian company has is using disused mine shafts to drop weights and transfer energy to and from the grid who are using a digital twin to start to optimize an interface to the energy grid so there's quite, I guess a push to automate and optimize at a global level using digital twins is another area that we see of demand in artificial intelligence and probably finally is the scientific computing, so in academia and medical research and scientific compute using the core artificial intelligence enabling capabilities it exemplified we sort of span the full breadth of the AI stack from strategy training consultancy right through down into the enabling capabilities and the data and we have a strong partnership with it, with NVIDIA I’m sure Keith will talk about this leveraging the amazing capabilities of the technology that NVIDIA provide and finally I think, the last thing I wanted to touch on is some of the barriers and I’m sure this will be a topic that will be touched on across the board in today's webinar is yeah we do see, probably awareness and education is one of the biggest barriers to adoption of AI in Australia but we've also got many of the other issues such as you know ethical use of AI explainability, you know security privacy, etc. But fundamentally I think the biggest barrier that we need to overcome is sort of an acceptance both from business leaders, the tech community but also the broader Australian community around the use of AI and how that can be done to benefit the community so thank you very much for the opportunity to come and speak with you all today, I really appreciate it and I’m really looking forward to hearing Talal and Keith's perspectives, obviously from other parts of the world. Thanks Ellie. Thank you Daniel that was an interesting intro and I look forward to fleshing out some of the points you made during the webinar next up I’d like to introduce Mr Talal Al-Khasi. He's the CEO of G42 Cloud. Talal joined G42 in 2020 after two years at the UAE space agency where he served as a Senior Advisor to the Director General prior to this role Talal served at the UAE embassy in Washington DC for nine years as a senior advisor for commercial affairs at the UAE trade and commercial office and led the US-UAE space affairs collaboration.
Prior to that he's worked in the energy sector at KBR where he led business development efforts for the GCC region in the downstream petrochemical segment and was based between Houston, Dubai, and Koba in Saudi Arabia. Talal serves on boards at high level international bodies including the world economic forum space technology council a board of new space capital and the board of Saya Corp Capital, the board of world space league and also Takalam online counselling currently in his role at G42 Cloud. He's been appointed to bring about the next phase of the company's evolution maximizing internal potential while innovating and creating customer value in new and adjacent areas welcome to the webinar, Talal and we're pleased to have you here.
Thank you, thank you Ellie and thank you your excellency Badhir it's good to see you again Daniel, Keith, travel panellists it's really a pleasure in fact I've known Keith for a while and Daniel I think we've got a lot in common in both how our companies operate and in the partnerships we have including that with NVIDIA. NVIDIA actually powers the supercomputer we have and we were speaking before the call of how fond I am of the Australia-UAE relations in fact in my previous role that Ellie mentioned with respect to the space industry. I had the pleasure and privilege of being part of the agreement that we signed between both countries and was able to visit Adelaide on a couple of occasions and worked closely with our Ambassador to Australia His Excellency Abdullah Zabusi and I just so imagined sent a note over here so it's good to see familiar people amongst us so let me maybe take a step back and explain a few things about G42 just for the unfamiliar. You know we're an AI and cloud computing company at our core and with that we were established in 2018 formally as G42 but prior to that there was a big data analytics business intelligence company that was started over here by our group. Our CEO who had come over from the US
where he worked in the business intelligence domain and was lured to the UAE's open, the government's open lab environment per se in allowing and enabling innovation in this domain to flourish by having one thing that I think was hard to come by in multiple other areas. When you're trying to move the needle on AI and as Badhir mentioned you know we have a Minister of AI and our Government embraces technology in a way that I think you know we're able to move quicker because of the population dynamics and the, you know, the need for technology to help us digitally transform. I think one thing that our group CEO Peng saw here that he didn't see when he was working for the likes of Facebook and other big clients in the US that had the volume or you know companies that are involved in AI that have a need, speed and velocity was the variety element and the variety element over here that third which is critical I think for AI was what really kind of showed him the opportunity at hand here in the UAE so started up as a business intelligence entity. Very analogous to what you see and you know with microstrategy or even talenteer and others and then quickly morphed into a lot more than just that by seeing the power of AI and how it how applicable it is to multiple industries that we now operate in and so we quickly, in 2018, when the opportunity presented itself morphed into first of all an AI institute. The inception institute of artificial intelligence which we own and operate till today
and started off more as a fundamental AI research organization with a hundred or so data scientists solving the you know hardest problems in computer vision NLP and machine learning to now more of an applied research entity and then the spin out from that was the Mohammed bin Zayed University of AI which now continues to focus on fundamental research but as a private company we are a for-profit entity so we quickly pivoted into applied research and started looking at industry verticals and thus the birth of G42 came about and the low-hanging fruit at that time was the energy industry obviously something that the UAE flourishes in and we were looking at efficiencies and optimizations in that domain that apply that AI was applicable to so we structured a joint venture with our national oil company Adnock and we do everything there from you know workflow optimization using AI to computer vision based borehole analysis. Looking at seismic data and looking at best places to drill saving you know billions of dollars but more so hours or actually weeks and armies of geologists and what they would have had to go through because we could just run that through a supercomputer thankfully, powered by NVIDIA and so that's how kind of G42 evolved and now we have multiple different industry verticals powered by the brain power let's say with the AI institute and then the muscle power which is our data centre infrastructure our connectivity layer which helps us with optimizing latency and we own the full value chain of both those and then our cloud compute infrastructure that orchestrates and supports delivering that AI solution to the multiple different industry verticals oil and gas and energy being one of them and then healthcare where we're doing our population genomics program also using sequencers from illumina ont bgi and then NVIDIA for even processing to other areas that we can also talk about so I sit at the point of the cloud layer where I’m actually supporting not only our group and enabling the different industry verticals we have from analytics to healthcare to energy but also now increasingly becoming more of a cloud services provider analogous to the likes of AWS and others but we're more of a national hyperscaler and we're not, you know, growing in the geographic footprint except for where we are deploying a similar architecture on a sovereign cloud level which we can also talk about later in different countries around the world as well. So I'll stop there, I just wanted to give that overarching perspective as to what G42 is the importance to the UAE’s national digital transformation agenda and where we play as an implementer and an executor of that vision and then where I sit at the G42 cloud layer. Thank you Talal that was great. And now I'd like to welcome Mr Keith Striyer who's the Vice President of Worldwide AI Initiatives at NVIDIA. Keith leads an initiative called AI
nations which is a worldwide program that helps government leaders and stakeholders develop plans to implement AI to advance national priorities and drive economic growth. Keith has worked with Senior Leaders across public and private sectors in all markets to help them understand the new art of the possible when AI GPU accelerated computing autonomous machines and IOT are deployed at scale he's a former global AI leader for EY and formerly the Global CDO for Deloitte with a 20-year record as a trusted advisor practice leader and corporate innovator he's particularly proud of his role advising the Government of Estonia. the United Nations Center for AI and robotics at the Hague and Canadian blood services. Keith's role as the lead AI strategy advisor to the CIO of Estonia was profiled in the Wall Street journal in November 2018. Thank
you for joining us Keith, it's great to see you. Hi, glad to see you. H hope you can hear me okay and it's great to see your friends tell Alex nice to see you as well. Thank you for that for those kind comments just seeing you on the screen just reminds me of what a small world we have here, or maybe I don't get out enough. I need to make some more new connections but I don't think that's true I just think I keep running into amazing people so and Daniel thank you as well for inviting NVIDIA to participate you know I was thinking about this a little bit earlier as I was getting ready to call that I think one thing that NVIDIA well so as was suggesting and Daniel as well one thing that the UAE and Australia have in common, many things I think and one of the lesser known things is their relationship with NVIDIA and we're quite proud of that. Obviously the relationship was separate but maybe now there's an opportunity to do to create more of a magic triangle sort of between us and that's actually quite exciting but one of the you know one of the other things I was thinking is that I think you know both the UAE and Australia in terms of the size of your economy and the size of your population you know probably are probably often underestimated you know in terms of the potential and impact you have on the world and I think you, both nations punch above their weight and have exceeded expectations particularly in this new chapter around artificial intelligence right and let's not forget it's real it's very new, right? I mean if you just go back five years ago uh there wasn't a nation in the world that had a national AI strategy, mind you a Minister of AI, you know and that that wasn't even really conceptually possible and so this whole chapter in sort of modern technology policy and economic policy is less than five years old so it's pretty new and yet the incredible pace of innovation and collaboration actually and those are you know those are both very interesting adjacent themes is is very important. You know NVIDIA’s history in NVIDIA shares this
kind of common theme with Australia and the UAE because frankly NVIDIA is one of the world's most valuable companies but it's not one of the world's biggest companies uh you know we are 50 times smaller than Amazon for example, 50 times. You know we're at least 15 or 20 times smaller than Microsoft in terms of just the sheer number of employees, right, number of offices we have about 22 000 employees which in the span of things is just not very much I mean, you mentioned EY. I used to be a partner at two weights and EY and each of those firms are high quality firms and they have in excess of 300 000 employees you know so 10 to 15 times more than NVIDIA. So, our impact on the world our value in the marketplace is not tied to the size of our company, it's tied to the to the velocity and scale of the innovation that we create and I think the same thing is true of Australia and the UAE, I think that is actually a very common trait and when it comes to artificial intelligence which is not one thing, right? AI is a constellation of technologies it's a suite of capabilities it includes both human and compute ecosystems, right? there's a lot going on there but again the UAE and Australia have both very ambitious and really, very thoughtful and how they've gone about building those things as Talal mentioned you know group 42 is this incredible company that most people haven't heard of and yet I will say with unscientific evidence but just based on my expert opinion that there's probably Group 42 probably has a more advanced infrastructure and a larger sort of human you know data science team in all in its overall raw AI capacity. It probably exceeds the vast majority of fortune 500 companies in the world you know hands down and as I'm sure you know the truth is most people have never heard of them and yet they are a powerhouse right and not just because they have really awesome inviting technology in their data center that's a part of it but that's not the only reason and so we're, so I think we're at this interesting time you know to see all that and one of the things that I focus on and it's part of my job and it's also more of a passion is really the, I'll say, the democratization of AI but that sounds a little, I feel it feels a little overused so I want to actually be very specific it's really about the inclusivity of AI on a global scale across nations I mean what most people don't fully appreciate is that there are only of the 193 nations in in the UN, only 31 have a top 500 supercomputer. That is one of one of the top 500 biggest computers in the world but for most of the last you know 30 years that didn't really matter I mean those computers had very specific and narrow purposes, used for scientific computing and high performance sort of simulations related to some very narrowly scoped fields and not having one, it was not really critical to your economy to your future to your prosperity to your national security per se, that's no longer true, right? The stack of technology that that drives science the stack of technology behind super-computing and the capabilities, the infrastructure and the intel the expertise that same stack of capability is now one of the engines for economic growth it's one of the was one of the turning points for both prosperity and security and it's actually quite important and the fact that 160 nations in the world do not have one, actually speaks to the growing disparity between the global north and the global south between other things and I know the UAE and Group 42 directly have been involved in some of those issues and frankly helping address that in Africa, for example, and also played a key role in using its technology during the covert crisis and then, you know helped, you know bring a lot of benefits to people who weren't you know to me immediately in their domain and but in the really in the next you know the next 10 years, Australia in the Asia-Pacific region and G42 and UAE in this region will actually have an opportunity to play even greater role as that divide that compute divide will actually lead to and throttle the economic progress of nations that do not have either the capability it's going to play a bigger role. I recently joined President Biden's National
AI Advisory Committee and this was a major topic of the inclusivity of AI and access to not just you know not just the computing but to the knowledge the education to the benefits to the shared sort of distribution of value from that technology that's not going to happen by itself so and one of the five working groups of that committee is actually in International Cooperation and I serve right and that's because it's so important for nations to get together, for nations with shared values a shared vision to collaborate and so I recognize and I praise the government of the UAE and Australia for creating this bond between you and for collaborating and of course the privilege for NVIDIA to collaborate and be a part of that in our own way and very excited for that sure so thank you again for inviting me here today until it was wonderful to see you and I will hand it back to you. Thank you Keith and we look forward to hearing more from you. Look this is obviously a very vast and complex topic with many areas of consideration that have been touched on in your opening remarks. I think just picking up on the thing that you just touched on Keith in terms of
the fortune 500 companies and obvious complement to G42 and which is unsurprising that it's really harnessed and grasped AI so much given the UAE has had such focus and made this area a priority of strategic interest but looking at private companies and the corporate perspective what is I guess the greatest barriers to AI adoption from private companies and combining this question with a question that's actually coming from Jack de Hennin from GC Advisory, what abilities need to be put in place, what critical abilities need to be put in place for an organization to fully harness AI in the private and corporate space. Yeah, it's that's a really big question, hard to answer quickly but here's the thing. I think one of the one of the mistakes that I that I’ve observed over the last few years is that people think about AI like it's I.T. and this is a big challenge. I think the first capability you
need is to recognize that artificial intelligence is not the same as information technology. You know it is technology and it involves technology but actually AI is different. AI is not implemented as much as it's applied right there's a strong iterative scientific component to it I mean that is changing there are parts of the AI spectrum that are becoming more industrialized and a little stronger and you can consume versions of AI through third parties that are essentially like tools you would implement but true competitiveness comes from applying AI to solve really complex problems and that is not easily done. That requires a level of patience and acceptance
some failure and also as well as understanding of the risks and limitations of AI which is very important so that you build in you know the governance and the safeguards on the front and the back end and those are just not capabilities that most organizations have right now in the same IT department the same CIO, the same data center all those things and I'll give you just a really, I won't name the company respectfully but just you know a recent example where a very large company purchased a very small computer for us and just a couple of servers frankly, so not nothing like what G42 has and but this is a very large company 30 billion dollar company and they had us ship these servers to their data center and then they got this very panicky call from the data center. The person that runs the data center and he's like what do you want me to do with these I'm like what do you mean, I said we have you know we're like a toyota dealer and you just drop lamborghini you know on our front on our backyard we have no idea what to do with a lamborghini you know. I mean and that's because most people just think technology's owed technology but that's not true when you're when you move into this world of very high-end high-performance computing and you are dealing with a level of hardware sophistication, software sophistication, the network infrastructure, the entire operation end-to-end is completely unfamiliar to 99.9 of those that work in data centers, IT departments it's a completely adjacent world
it may look the same but it's not and it requires completely different kinds of expertise and so you just have, I think, the most important skills to understand that just understand that you're moving into a new phase this coexists and sits on top of traditional computing it's right it obviously has things similar in common but it is a new direction and there's a high failure rate. I mean there's a very high failure rate for those that do not acknowledge the distinction and again as I mentioned earlier the risks, the governance needs so all in all, I think the number one skill is the leadership to sort of humility to acknowledge you're going in the right direction you're going a different direction and to give the support and the sponsorship to those in that effort including your partners external lenders. To understand this is not like implementing an ERP system this is a completely new chapter so I would just sort of end on that. No dan is shaking his head, so we're in agreement. Daniel did you have anything to add to that? Oh look, I couldn't agree more with what Keith had to say. I think probably the other thing that we see on a really practical from a really practical perspective is the need to get your data in order and understand your data and understand sort of traditional data management and real sort of basics it really exposes the fact that if you don't have your data in order it's very difficult to lead an organization and to leverage that data in different ways.
If you don't have the fundamentals of data management right, I think that's another sort of when you talk about sort of those foundational capabilities that need to be in place. In addition to what Keith mentioned that just the fundamentals of good management of data is a key enabling capability that organizations need to start to embrace if they're to get on board the wagon. Yeah and Talal, did you have anything to add to that? Well I think it was well covered by both Keith and Daniel. I mean if I was to say one other thing is you know it's important for people to actually rather than just listen and hear the buzzwords. AI and everything else and it's important to see the magic that is AI or what it produces and once they see that, call it whatever you want but you know when you were a kid and you saw a magic trick and you thought it was actually really magic you don't necessarily need to know what's happening behind the scenes but that data driven decision making that predictive analytics with high compute can provide and certain domains are relevant to the person that is on the fence and maybe hesitant to embrace AI thinking it's a lot more than it really is. I think that is a very powerful thing and I'm wowed by it on a daily basis by some of the stuff our team puts together in enterprise solutions with big data as Daniel mentioned and you know you know like having the Rolls Royce in your data center versus the Honda and your data center these are you know you can you can use those as data points and say yes we have the best and we have but at the end of the day it's all about the solutions that we're trying to drive towards so when I mentioned computer vision-based borehole analysis, you show them the bottom line in terms of numbers and the decisions and the lessened amount of geologists that you would need to solve something that would have otherwise taken weeks in two hours because of the compute and that's like you know brute force compute happening in the background you know going through multiple images and then coming out with something with you know either change detection but then you have predictive analytics in terms of what may happen based on data ingestion and that is really like magic and I think the more people that actually see this, the more they will appreciate, number one, that it's achievable and they can apply it to some of the pain points that they may have and number two, the more they'll understand it and not fear it per se because of sometimes the dystopic view that people in Hollywood kind of attach to AI in many cases. I’m not saying it shouldn't be something we look at, I think with the narrow
intelligence we have today now super intelligence on a narrow basis we don't have much to fear but once it's more generalized then there will need to be ethical considerations in place for how you regulate that on a government level either you know in a single country or multilaterally even absolutely and we'll touch on that in in a little while in terms of so, I hear you if you've got your data organized as a corporate as a fortune 500 company that's a good place to start it's understandable that a lot of corporates that operate outside of the research and development sphere don't have the risk appetite they don't have the you know investor sort of bandwidths to fail and they certainly don't have governance bandwidth to fail in sort of exploring these areas and I don't know if there is an answer to this question but what sectors or areas within the private space do you see have developed AI capabilities that are corporate in sort of either the health space or the financial services space or the defense space or in mining, for example, Cannon should be aware of at this point that has been de-risked to a level where they could start exploring it as a company. Do you want me to respond? So it's interesting, so we signed a partnership recently a few months ago with Australia's National Science Research Agency CSIRO and I remember in working on that agreement before we put it together you know part of one of the key parts was to identify sort of the areas of focus and we had a lot of trouble picking, narrowing, the areas of focus because there was so much opportunity and every time we would shorten the list someone would add something back and this kind of goes to your question which is you know they're, I mean, AI is this piece of general-purpose technology that is reshaping every industry right so it's uh we could we it was hard to pick I mean certainly you mentioned mining certainly there are specific industries obviously in Australia that have actually been out in front of this topic, I mean the mining sector in Australia has really been one of the leading developers and implementers. Early doctors of autonomous systems, the largest robot in the world is a train in Australia right. You know, I believe and you know those mines are completely autonomous at this point like at group South 32 and others were you know hundreds of miles away you know they're monitoring a mine it's basically run by robots and so this has become that you know. So absolutely now across the world you won't see that as much but there isn't a sector of the Australian economy or that that isn't affected and in the UAE what was really fascinating about the UV in from the beginning because of the strategy was so comprehensive that every agency in the government you know from the roads authority to everybody you know had to have, to have a really well-developed AI strategy and that was just a requirement and that had to be tied to national benchmarks and other things so it was really quite, you know, it was quite aggressive and so again I think that this, it's hard to pick an industry that is not affected some industries are out front clearly you know than others and I think you know it tends to be the tech sector first you know kind of led, you know, led the industry and then from the tech sector it's kind of come down to these other industries I would say healthcare is not a leading industry it's just one of the more important industries by all means it's one of the best examples of where AI is going to create a lot of value for the world but it's not ahead by any stretch you know there's still a lot of work to be done. I think the industrial sectors manufacturing cars auto that, you know, that feel use you know, I think they're very aggressive adopters but you know as you mentioned financial services is huge I mean particularly in fraud detection and customer service. There's a significant adoption of AI and automation in general in that sector so you can't
really pick one it's hard to say who's out ahead but certainly within certain countries like mining in Australia you will see leaders in those fields so let me hand it back to the other panellists. I might jump in there if you don't mind we just got some yeah well look I agree 100% Keith. I think it's not necessarily about the sector but almost like the use case if you like within the sector and the transportability of that use case across different sectors and so as I mentioned at the beginning, I think something like object detection as an example can be utilized you know the primary use case that we see in Australia is around law enforcement and national security however that same application of that use case can be applied to facilities management service delivery various different other contexts with a really positive return on investment so where I think the, you know, that one of the benefits of bringing a group like this together for a discussion and obviously to further this work is to really draw out those stories and create the art of what's possible that is applicable across different sectors but with tangible metrics that start to demystify that journey of getting to it to an AI enabled world, you know I think people – yeah do you point Keith around ERPS I think every uh you know person who's done an it project is has got some sort of scars from a failed IT delivery project that's taken three years and returned half of its benefits that it had promised and I think the introduction of AI is completely different but people put it in the same put it in the same sort of category I think we can incrementally deliver value with AI and we can start small and grow with very little investment and we need to demystify that sort of approach to the introduction of these technologies to help people embrace and sort of start to play a little bit more with the art of what's possible and I think at the moment everyone's still in that stage where they still think the AI is is that movie from Hollywood and it's going to change the world and somehow take away your control and your ownership of your own being. Yeah, just while we're on you Daniel, if I may just interject for a second, you mentioned one of the four themes in your opening remarks currently as being the delivery of digital twins you did refer to one example, but I just wondered if you could elaborate a bit more on what is a digital twin and like give some more practical examples of how that might apply in in maybe some other sectors as well Just yeah so certainly yeah look at look the case I'll be quite specific with this case, so we have an emerging you know green energy storage company that's got quite an innovative value proposition of reusing abandoned mine shafts and turning them into energy storage and distribution and so what we're doing is working with this company on the establishment of a digital twin which is a digital representation of the physical, you know physical environment and so that's really the use of that is it's done through modeling through geographically accurate modeling and it'll throw through the scent through sensors through video and through feedback mechanisms that allow you to create almost the digital model of the of that physical world and so what we're doing that for the value proposition for that organization is to really look at optimizing their operations reducing downtime you know preventative maintenance but also about optimizing the system as a whole and its interaction with the energy grid so looking at global optimization of assets and using analytical models to drive when you do and don't release power into the networks and so you know another I think you might have mentioned that, Ellie, at the beginning or maybe it was before the webinar started the concept of autonomous vehicles having their own virtual world to run their training in to train the model that will work in a physical world negates the need to simulate tests in a physical world and so that's sort of the concept of moving trial and error into a virtual world to do predictive work that actually can optimize the way you deliver things is a really exciting part of the use of AI so we see that uh you know very so if that's one use case to that we're working through we see it being used in facilities management so traditional ways in a very simple example is you might have a contract for somebody to mow the lawns out the front of the building or to cut the hedges and maybe that contract happens once a month but why don't we cut the lawns when the lawns need to be cut so such a simple example of how you could use intelligence and through you know a representation of real world to drive intelligent decisions around optimizing a system. Fantastic, thanks Daniel. Talal from the Muhammad bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
to the UAE Ministry of Artificial Intelligence the UAE is obviously investing heavily in in this space and not many countries have Ministers for Artificial Intelligence but the UAE does. What opportunities do you see for the Australia and Emirati businesses to collaborate on looking forward and with the things that you're learning as an organization but also that you're aware of from the country perspective. Yeah it's a good question I think there are quite a bit I don't know, if I was to pinpoint one I would look at how do we leverage one another strengths and different domains with industries and applications and then try to figure out how a company like ours or similar companies to us can partner with Australian companies be it here in the UAE or in Australia to unlock the full potential of those use cases but like you said I think you know the environment that the UAE government has created that allows us to operate and as he put a punch above our weight is really something we're blessed with and it is a testament to the vision of the leadership in really helping move the needle on AI not just locally but on a global level and so from my perspective I think what I've seen in Australia again similar industries in energy the mining one specifically is something that's quite conducive to having autonomous operations and robotics which obviously the underlying technology thereof would be artificial intelligence to kind of help enhance those mechanisms I think there are ways that we would be able to build on what Australia has done very well in those areas and then apply them to use cases over here that are quite unique to our environment and again to the point Daniel made about transferability that's the type of thing that we look for in fact I remember when I was in the space industry the one thing that I was extremely excited about you know in tying up was how do we figure out how to take what Australia has built in the mining industry with autonomous operations and robotics to space even and do that on the moon or on mars so there are so many different things that we could look at collaborating on but you know I think the most of hanging fruits would be in the healthcare space the energy space or whatever it might be looking at the common denominator and some of those technologies the ai-based technologies the ones Daniel mentioned computer vision NLP and in our case we have you know a much more advanced Arabic language model than other countries in the world so you could look at applying what you've learned and applied NLP to in Australia to the Arabic world that has 400 million Arabic speakers so it's not just AUE centric but from the UAE you serve that using and leveraging the you know infrastructure we have and the support we have from a partner a common partner like NVIDIA and finding those synergies that we could then unlock value together with.
Great thanks Talal now we have two questions. Christopher Pyne I think is we'd like to ask good questions so sir would you like to go ahead. Thanks Ellie and thank you very much for moderating this webinar event this afternoon and thank you to Daniel and Keith and Talal for joining us it's a very important subject it's a very much an insider's outsiders subject and listening to the conversation that only reinforces that point the people inside the tent know what everyone's talking about and people outside the tent feel completely divorced from it and for me as a former politician and minister you know the one of the biggest challenges I think to AI and its take up uh is the ignorance of legislators, regulators and Ministers about what AI is all about and its uses and its impact on the economy especially over the long term which is obviously going to be immense so does the industry have any kind of strategy that they have that they are collaborating on or thinking about to take the debate about AI its uses and its ethics to regulators and legislators who could actually be the biggest problem in AI reaching its full potential. Yeah Chris I feel like you know my pain and so I feel like it really kind of really got right in there a couple of things on that topic so that's a really great question first off. Yeah so
with all with all due respect you know ai is a complicated topic right and so I think it's not that hard to understand why a lot of people don't understand it and to some extent there's also a lot of this misinformation but as I go around the world and I have the privilege of being sort of the primary interface to foreign government so I have meetings and conversations every single week with governments across the world and so I have a pretty healthy view on this topic for the most part 99 of those that I meet do not understand what AI is or worse they have the wrong understanding and you know dangerously wrong but also you know even going below that they may understand you know there's kind of these three pillars AI there's sort of data there's the algorithms and those that create the algorithms the you know the data scientists and then there's the infrastructure the computing and to some degree I'd say there's a fair amount of there's some understanding it's not always correct but there's some understanding and there's a lot of policy focus on data and issues related to data and there's some focus and policies around algorithms there's far less understanding on the infrastructure side and it's actually such a blind spot globally that the OECD has set up a dedicated task force called the AI compute and climate task force whose primary mission is to develop a easy to understand non-technical framework for helping government leaders sort of get hands around you know how much AI capacity do they have and is it enough for their country and I’m the co-chair of that that task force and Angus Makustra from Cyro is also on the task force and so this is a this is a widespread problem you know worldwide and as you said sometimes the problem but it is what it is I mean so I think part of the obligation to it from an industry perspective is to have these conversations right to have to engage and to educate so it's not so much to sell or to market but to educate and I know I spend a considerable amount of my time doing just that I know other I know other big tech firms also do that as well and have a lot of engagement on these topics but it is it is a blind spot and it does lead to calculations from a policy perspective and I would say because you mentioned economics and you mentioned ethics and what I would say is actually if there is a bright spot I would say there's certainly a lot more focused and understanding on the potential risks today than ever before on AI and there's a lot of both domestic and international bodies you know focused on that topic and so forth, you know and shared principles right from the OECD’s shared principles on that topic and the EU’s leadership around trustworthy AI and so forth so I feel like there is progress there what I think is coming up behind it maybe a little bit earlier is just the understanding that artificial intelligence is going to be and is going to be one of the key drivers of economic growth and across all industries and that failure to invest in the skills the human you know component as well as the infrastructure and the ecosystems will directly affect prosperity over time and the opportunity for countries to participate and what you know you can think of as sort of the dividend from AI which all the firms have a number you know PwC, McKinsey everyone's come up with a number but let's just you know it's in excess of somewhere in the 10 to 15 trillion you know range but you know that won't be evenly distributed right not every country will get that you know will get its equal share you have to go after it and I think that is that is definitely where you know more education has to be sort of focused on so anyway so I think it's a great point everyone struggles with that issue but there are some bright spots but I know that I'm doing my part and I'm sure others are as well I mean Daniel Yeah I agree, I agree with you Keith. Daniel if I may, you know one thing I would mention you know sometimes we look at ethical AI and ethics in AI in a very one-dimensional fashion and then we see it from again trying to demystify it to help people avoid thinking of AI as something that could be that could lead to a dystopic future and the terminator scenario and all these other uh you know crazy things but I think the immediate that we're seeing more and I think Keith you touched on it in terms of data privacy and what Europe has done is ensuring that while we are creating the infrastructure of enablement for AI which in our case or I think even in Daniel's case we are building we're more like the utility and then there is not really a regulator in place in many different countries or on a multilateral level to show you what the right approach to using AI would be or what would be ethical and what would not and it's very hard to come to a common denominator on anything these days even at the UN so you know AI is actually going to be a lot more subjective but when you think of data privacy that is an important thing and that is something that we could immediately address and while we enable technological digital transformation with the compute and with the muscle power that many companies can bring to the table or with the brain power on the analytics side what we what we need to do is also enable digital sovereignty I think that is going to be something that's increasingly important across the world especially for countries that are leapfrogging the traditional way of building the capability to get to that point so you know a country in Africa would be a recipient of technologies from multiple different countries not every one of them have the same shirt set of values right and so their influence will be a product of the technology provider what we have done successfully in the UAE and it's not like we strove out to do that what we did was a consequence of the demand and an economic forcing function that the government had we need to build and operate own and operate our own digitally sovereign cloud in the UAE and based on that model that we kind of stumbled upon five years ago we now have first movers advantage in an area where other you know big cloud providers are trying to play and so what we have in that model that's been successful in the UAE where you're looking to emulate in other countries on a smaller scale so that they can get a taste of digital transformation without feeling the hesitation or worry that there would be privacy issues or that their clouds and their in digital infrastructure would be subject to foreign jurisdictions or the potential of there to be an off switch to that uh system and so I think to a point Keith made earlier about democratizing I think rather than it be looked at as only democratizing ai it's one where you're giving every country and every entity that is a recipient of this technology the ability to independently operate it in a way that allows for as much digital sovereignty as possible. That's a great point Ellie, I might just add one last point to that one if I can quickly I look up I think through this whole conversation we've all seen the enormity of the problem that we've got in front of us but I can't help but think that what we've all got to do is just take one step forward and everyone takes one step forward we will eventually get there and I think you know when we think about general AI and sort of rather than the narrow use cases you can almost get lost in the forest without seeing the trees and so I know that it exemplified we try and simplify we try and what take one step some of our enabling capabilities which is similar to what G42 have got around a sovereign high performance compute based on NVIDIA really bring down the barriers to entry that allows somebody to take that first step understand grow solve some of these issues and move forward because if you almost step back and try and solve all these issues before you move forward I think we'll never get anywhere so just wanted to add that last piece in. Fabulous, thank you. So just one last question that I had for us to wrap up really and it
ideally is a big question but if you could keep it brief that would be good so the year is 2035 and what is one thing that that we have and or are experiencing that we aren't today that you that you predict or expect us to have in our world then can I jump in with a one-liner that is a community that is embracing innovation using ai. I would say we're experiencing less gravity because we're on mars by then. How do you confirm how do you beat mars oh boy oh that's really look, I, you mentioned digital twins what I would just earlier I would just circle back to that say actually I believe that the ability to simulate not just a metaverse but millions upon millions of virtual worlds for different purposes will become a strategic capability for nations and for companies and just and to a large extent the ability to simulate a virtual world becomes a tool almost for time travel and the ability to both look in the past and predict the future for anything whether it's for business or policy purposes and I think this will be a fundamental change in how we approach things the question the question becomes do the people in the simulation know that they're in a simulation. That's a whole other issue that's a whole bunch of webinars. Great so we've got greater understanding the embracing of this and collaboration we're on mars some of us and we're if we're not on mars we're in we're in one of several metaverses simulating life with the hope of actually doing it in in real life.
Fantastic thank you so much gentlemen. What a what a stimulating conversation and I think that Christopher made a very very good point in that it is an insider's outsiders topic and thank you very much for explaining just a small small part of this to us generalists or our outsiders today and for expanding a little bit for those insiders who have joined us. Just a just a reminder to everybody on the webinar if you'd like to be involved in the working group that the council is launching today please reach out and she'll add you to that to that working group and if no one else has any further comments I'd just like to say thank you a special thanks to our co-chairs His Excellency Baralalama and the Honourable Christopher Pyne and a big thank you to the AUS-UAE Business Council Team, especially Tamika for putting this webinar together and Kacey as well for supporting on this topic we look forward to seeing what the working group comes up with and discussing this further in the future. Thank you thank you very much ellie okay thank you thank you all very much thank you
2022-05-31 15:56
