RIYADH: A top academic at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology has said he believes Qast’s AI initiative will contribute to a new golden age for science – analogous to the Islamic golden age, when the Middle East was the world’s leading force in science. Was leading and technical.
Jurgen Schmidhuber, director of KAUST’s AI initiative and professor of computer science, said artificial intelligence is already important to society. Schmidthuber was speaking at the Launch Summer Program for Artificial Intelligence 2023 at Cust Academy.
The program is a collaboration between the Saudi Data and Artificial Intelligence Authority and KAUST and according to the organizers, “will serve as a stepping stone to enhance AI research and development, as well as an opportunity for researchers to expand their knowledge Will happen.” Future of AI.
KAUST Academy will host two summer schools as part of its AI Summer Program led by Sultan Albarkati. One is for high school students and the other is for top graduate students in Saudi Arabia.
“In addition to AI, the summer schools include a range of curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, including lessons in applied mathematics, scientific writing, presentation skills, leadership and entrepreneurship,” Schmidthuber said.
He said that such training has helped many Saudi youth secure jobs in large companies. “Young Saudis trained by the Qoust Academy are already making an impact in the Kingdom,” he added. “Our graduates have secured positions in top organizations such as Aramco, SDAIA and the Ministry of Information. Our students have also been selected for graduate studies in some of the world’s top schools.
Schmidthuber claimed that Cust is now the university with the highest impact per faculty, ahead of the usual suspects like Caltech and Princeton.
“There are very ambitious projects in the Kingdom that will involve a lot of AI. KAUST (leadership) knows that AI will change everything, strongly supports AI research, and persuaded me to come here.
The Kingdom has very ambitious projects that will involve a lot of artificial intelligence. KAUST leadership knows that AI will change everything, strongly supports AI research, and persuaded me to come here.
Jurgen SchmidthuberDirector of KAUST’s AI Initiative
Schmidthuber says AI is vital to today’s society, citing as proof the technology he helped develop is used by billions of people every day.
“For example, since the mid-2010s, artificial neural networks developed in my labs are on billions of smartphones, and are used billions of times per day,” he said. “For example, Facebook’s automatic translation, Google’s speech recognition, Google Translate, Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.”
The German scientist’s appreciation for technology and development began at age 15, he said, and his advice for students and researchers is to learn the fundamentals of math and science and be part of the history of technology.
“As a teenager in the 1970s, my goal was to build a machine that could learn and improve on its own, be smarter than myself in my lifetime, limited only by the limits of computability and physics, recursively self Achieving super-intelligence through. -Improvement.”
Schmidthuber’s work has been recognized internationally and he has been called the “father of modern AI” by the media.
He received the International Neural Networks Society’s Helmholtz Award in 2013 and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society’s Neural Networks Pioneer Award in 2016 for “pioneering contributions to deep learning and neural networks”.
Schmidthuber said: “We’ve made a lot of progress since then, but there’s still work to do. My advice: learn the basics of math, physics, computer science and AI, and be a part of history by helping to achieve the end goal! I’m a little envious of today’s young people, because they’ve had more time than I have to enjoy the immense benefits of AI.”
Recent advances in technology have shown proven effectiveness in AI, Schmidthuber said, adding that it will eventually transform all aspects of our civilization.
“In fact, it is getting harder and harder to find areas that are not affected by AI,” he said. “Every five years, computers are getting 10 times cheaper. Simple extrapolation of this exponential trend predicts that the 21st century will see cheap computers that exceed a thousand times the combined computational power of all human brains. And soon Heh… there will be trillions of such devices.
“Almost all intelligence will be outside the human brain. Everything will change. This is much more than just another industrial revolution. This is something new that will eventually transcend mankind and even biology,” he continued. “It’s a privilege to see it start and to contribute something to it.”