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Artificial intelligence is being tipped to be the UAE's most important industry over the next 10 years, with universities urged to step up efforts to prepare the next generation of high-tech workers.

The fast-rising sector was ranked ahead of construction, electronics, aerospace, robotics, design engineering and IT and cybersecurity in a poll of technology and engineering employees in the Emirates.

The UAE government is driving forwards with ambitious plans to establish itself as a global AI hub.

In 2017, the country appointed Omar Al Olama as its first Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence and later adopted the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2031 to promote the growth of the cutting-edge technology.

The Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi was established in 2019 to develop the skills of top talent from across the world to lead workplaces of the future.

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The survey, commissioned by the UK-based Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), and carried out by YouGov, polled 325 employers and employees in the UAE in December 2021 and January 2022.

Julian Young, IET president, said artificial intelligence would most certainly continue to grow in prominence.

Alongside that, I would almost add everything to do with digitalisation. Everything in the future in a highly advanced technological community, will be about digitalisation and getting computers to do far more work for us," said Mr Young.

So if one has a skilled workforce in this field, one would be able to make a profitable company and a profitable organisation and be a truly global player.

I'm not surprised to see that these are the skill sets that are required in three years' time, that these are the skill sets required in 10 years' time.

Sir Julian Young, President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said artificial intelligence would most certainly continue to grow in prominence. Photo: the Institution of Engineering and Technology

"If you pick up artificial intelligence and then think about the type of courses that people are undertaking. Do we need courses in artificial intelligence? Yes, of course. But in the more traditional areas of engineering, mechanical, electrical, electronic aerospace, there needs to be a digital component."

He said all of the traditional industries need digital and software and computer science inputs to be able to make the best of their workforce.

Ian Mercer, head of international operations for the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said universities could use the findings to ensure their courses run parallel to the immediate and future demands of the economy.

"If I were an academician, then I would be thinking, 'if that's where the where the industry is going to go then the courses that we're going to offer to students probably need to be ramped up to be where the need is going to be'," Mr Mercer said.

"At the end of the day, universities want jobs to be available for the people that they put through the system.

"If you look at the the ambitions of the UAE government, they want to become a tech hub of the world."

He said that in a post-oil and gas economy, technology may be one of the main workforce providers in the region.

A graduation ceremony at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi. All photos: Khushnum Bhandari / The National

The UAE is continuing to explore ways in which artificial intelligence can be used to boost business, make government departments more agile and efficient, and support health services.

Artificial intelligence could soon be used to tailor UAE government employees working hours to their own personal productivity.

The initiative, which is being studied by the Federal Authority for Government Human Resources, is one of a host of practical applications for AI in everyday life.

In March, 41 business leaders who took a three-month course at Mohamed bin Zayed University for Artificial Intelligence, celebrated their graduation.

The course aimed to support UAE government and business sectors. Participants were required to complete 12 rigorous weeks of coursework, lectures and collaborative project work.

Dr Jamal Al Kaabi, undersecretary at the Department of Health in Abu Dhabi, joined the programme after the Covid-19 pandemic made him realise the potential of artificial intelligence.

He believes wearable technology and AI could be crucial in providing home services and follow-up care for the elderly.

Updated: May 20, 2022, 5:20 AM

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Artificial intelligence to be UAE's top sector over next decade, survey finds - The National

Megan Berry and Alex Gurevich appointed Chief Product Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Octane AI.

As CPO of Octane AI, Megan Berry will lead the product, design, and engineering teams in enhancing Octane AI's platform to enable more users to create relationships with their site visitors based on real data, and turn them into customers. Berry has over a decade of experience working with and managing remote product teams, having served as a Vice President of Product at Octane AI and RebelMouse. Berry previously worked at ad pioneer Mobclix and social influence platform Klout before its acquisition by Lithium.

"I've never been more excited about what we're building here at Octane AI! We want to empower every ecommerce merchant to have more conversations with their customers and to leverage zero-party data to humanize their shopping experience," said Megan Berry, CPO of Octane AI. "Merchants know the importance of collecting and owning customer data, but they need solutions that make it easy to use this data to improve the full customer journey. That's why we are prioritizing AI features that will make collecting zero-party data a no-brainer. We are making it incredibly fast and easy for marketers to get up and running with zero-party data marketing."

After joining Octane AI as the Vice President of Finance and Operations, Alex Gurevich quickly transformed the operations of the company to be in a position to scale both the customer base and the internal team. With a track record of impact in high-growth technology businesses like Google, Zendesk, and Credit Karma, and seeing each of these companies go either through an IPO or acquisition, Gurevich is well-suited to lead the operations of Octane AI. In the new COO role, Gurevich will oversee internal functions, such as finance and people operations, as well as customer facing functions, such as account management.

"Since I joined in March of 2021, it's been really great to see our customer base grow 80%+ and the monthly Gross Merchandise Value these customers generate through our software more than double," said Alex Gurevich, COO of Octane AI. "We've been able to have this kind of growth with AI only in our name. Looking at our roadmap and seeing how powerful our software will become with machine learning, I am excited about driving increasing value for our customers and making their businesses more automated, smarter, and personalized."

To learn more about Octane AI, visit http://www.octaneai.com. Follow @OctaneAI on Twitter to stay up-to-date with the latest news, offerings and marketing tips.

About Octane AI

Octane AI is the zero-party data marketing platform for Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants. Octane AI's patented conversational technology enables thousands of merchants to collect zero-party data and leverage it for personalization at scale across their website, email and SMS. Ultimately, brands using Octane AI see an increase in sales conversions, opt-ins, AOV and LTV.

Elected the Best Storefront App by Shopify in 2021, Octane AI is helping brands build deep relationships with their customers and personalize the shopping experience. The fully-remote martech company employs team members in over 12 countries and has received funding from Javelin Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Bullpen Capital, and Boost VC top Silicon Valley investors behind big brands like Shopify, Masterclass, Snapchat, BigCommerce, Canva and Alibaba. For more information, visit: https://www.octaneai.com/

SOURCE Octane AI

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Octane AI Promotes Two Executives to C-Suite as Company Bets on Artificial Intelligence to Fuel its Zero-Party Data Platform - PR Newswire

While the healthcare industry has faced unprecedented operational constraints in recent years, including limited physical capacity, vulnerable patients, loss of revenue, and shortages of staff, it has also reaped opportunities to adapt and excel.

Health systems and hospitals have been especially primed to rapidly adopt digital transformation and technology initiatives to predict and manage optimal scheduling, staffing, and patient flow.

With the support of AI-based analytics tools, health systems can better use the assets in which they have already invested. By utilizing critical resources like operating rooms, infusion clinics, and inpatient bed units effectively, they can improve financial performance, relieve burden on staff, and treat higher volumes of patients in shorter periods of time. Many healthcare organizations have already deployed analytics to achieve these results, quickly seeing a large return on a relatively small investment in implementation.

With their upcoming Transform Hospital Operations Summit, hosted in partnership with Beckers, healthcare analytics expert LeanTaaS will share these providers journeys, results, and stories. Driven by a focus on deploying AI to achieve better return on investment, the two-day program will connect over 1,000 attendees with health system executives, technology leaders, and industry experts to discuss how hospitals across the U.S. use AI and predictive and prescriptive analytics tools to solve critical challenges arising from case backlogs, provider burnout and staffing shortages, and increased patient wait times.

Summit attendees will learn about success stories from C-suite hospital and health system leaders who have transformed operations and unlocked revenue by using AI and machine learning solutions. These sessions will encompass a wide range of perspectives on this topic, including the strategies of breaking through operational barriers with partnerships, the urgency behind implementing high-powered AI, the best practices for scaling disruptive new technology at scale, the potential for AI to revolutionize the healthcare industry, and more.

Primary speakers include Dr. Patrick McGill, EVP, Chief Transformation Officer at Community Health Network; Dr. Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Oncology Services at St. Elizabeth Healthcare; and Dr Eric Eskiolu, Executive Vice President, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer and Co-Director of the Institute of Innovation and Artificial Intelligence at Novant Health.

Were excited to speak at Transform and share our experiences with AI and analytics, but just as importantly, about how were building a culture that supports transformation through a commitment to clinical excellence, workforce development, and process improvement, shared Aaron Miri, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital and Information Officer and Amy Huveldt, VP of Performance Excellence, both of Baptist Health and who will also be primary speakers.

Further speakers include healthcare leaders and experts from Cone Health, Mount Nittany Medical Center, Multicare, UCHealth, University of Utah Health, Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, and Yale New Haven Health. These sessions will feature healthcare executives highlighting the results they have achieved by leveraging AI in their operations, including increasing surgical case length accuracy by 4%; reducing infusion patient wait times by 30%; and decreasing inpatient time-to-admit by 16%, despite an 18% increase in COVID-19 census. Attendees can build a hospital operations summit schedule based on interest and specialty, choosing from three Learning Tracks: Perioperative, Infusion Centers, and Inpatient Beds.

As the healthcare industry continues to grapple with lingering effects of the pandemic, its no secret that health systems need to do more with less while also prioritizing the valuable time and wellbeing of staff. Were looking forward to our June Transform event, as it will hone in on critical healthcare issues and how AI can support hardworking hospital leaders, said Mohan Giridharadas, LeanTaaS founder and CEO. This event will provide all attendees with the resources needed to compete and thrive by using smarter capacity management decisions every single day.

Transform registration is free for all attendees. To register and learn more about the sessions and speakers that will be featured at the summit, view the conference agenda here.

Read more:
Virtual hospital operations summit to focus on role of Artificial Intelligence in achieving ROI for system wide impact - Becker's Hospital Review

Malta is turning to Artificial Intelligence to reduce traffic congestion, improve the distribution of energy and avoid scenarios of out-of-stock medicine among others through an investment of 4 million.

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The funds will be injected in six national projects led by the Malta Digital Innovation Authority:

-Management traffic project (2million). Existing traffic lights, CCTV and display panels systems will be incorporated into one system to be able to draw up traffic patterns and understand better what is causing congestion. The project would eventually help reduce congestion and time spent in traffic as the information will be passed on to Transport Malta's control centre, which will in turn distribute the information among motorists through apps such as Google Maps.

-Understand and better manage energy load distribution across the island by collecting data from ARMS, Enemalta and Water Service Corporation (376,000). Analysing the data collected through these three entities would allow the same entities to maximise their resources and provide real-time support. It would also become possible to forecast problems by analysing past data. This investment is a stepping stone towards the implementation of a smart grid network that would see energy clients receiving information about possible energy wastage at home.

-24/7 chatbot for servizz.gov and 153 phone clients (590,000). The chatbot service will be in Maltese and English and will help clients avoid having to physically turn up at one of the branches if they don't find the information they require online.

-Personalised educational programmes depending on children's achievements, skills and their aspirations (150,000).

-Analysing budget and stock levels of the health services' Central Procurement Supply Unit (300,000). The system would help forecast demand and supply to avoid out-of-stock medicine.

-A system that creates what is known as digital tourist 'personas' depending on visitors' interests, lifestyle and demographics (800,000). With the help of these personas, the Malta Tourism Authority would be able to better understand what tourists are actually after and can draft policies and initiatives based on visitors' changing interests.

Nearly all five projects are set to be completed by 2023, with the traffic management project being completed by 2024.

The AI systems are being applied to scenarios that involve a huge amount of data that cannot be processed manually, Minister Silvio Schembri assured at a press conference on Thursday.

The projects, he added, formed part of the national AI strategy, with the ultimate aim being to support citizens in their everyday life, incentivise research and ensure progress in the health and education sectors.

"We aspire to become a place from where companies can set up and develop AI systems. Through these projects we can also show that Malta can adapt to such new technologies."

AI, he noted, could be adapted to everyday processes that most take for granted. The strategy was launched in 2019, but the launch of projects required a lot of research, he said.

MDIA CEO Kenneth Brincat told the same conference that a further 500,000 had been invested in research and scholarships.

Since the strategy's launch in 2019, the authority itself had carried out research and work to ensure that its aims are effectively implemented by 2030.

He added that the authority's most important role was its regulatory responsibilities.

Brincat said that while Malta already had a certified regulatory programme for the AI sector, the EU was still discussing a mandatory regulatory framework.

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Can artificial intelligence solve the traffic problem? - Times of Malta

Dr. Sephus discusses breaking down barriers to machine learning at Ars Frontiers 2022. Click here for transcript.

Welcome to the week after Ars Frontiers! This article is the first in a short series of pieces that will recap each of the day's talks for the benefit of those who weren't able to travel to DC for our first conference. We'll be running one of these every few days for the next couple of weeks, and each one will include an embedded video of the talk (along with a transcript).

For today's recap, we're going over our talk with Amazon Web Services tech evangelist Dr. Nashlie Sephus. Our discussion was titled "Breaking Barriers to Machine Learning."

Dr. Sephus came to AWS via a roundabout path, growing up in Mississippi before eventually joining a tech startup called Partpic. Partpic was an artificial intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) company with a neat premise: Users could take photographs of tooling and parts, and the Partpic app would algorithmically analyze the pictures, identify the part, and provide information on what the part was and where to buy more of it. Partpic was acquired by Amazon in 2016, and Dr. Sephus took her machine-learning skills to AWS.

When asked, she identified accessasthe biggest barrier to the greater use of AI/MLin a lot of ways, it's another wrinkle in the old problem of the digital divide. A core component of being able to utilize most common AI/ML tools is having reliable and fast Internet access, and drawing on experience from her background, Dr. Sephus pointed out that a lack of access to technology in primary schools in poorer areas of the country sets kids on a path away from being able to use the kinds of tools we're talking about.

Furthermore, lack of early access leads to resistance to technology later in life. "You're talking about a concept that a lot of people think is pretty intimidating," she explained. "A lot of people are scared. They feel threatened by the technology."

One way of tackling the divide here, in addition to simply increasing access, is changing the way that technologists communicate about complex topics like AI/ML to regular folks. "I understand that, as technologists, a lot of times we just like to build cool stuff, right?" Dr. Sephus said. "We're not thinking about the longer-term impact, but that's why it's so important to have that diversity of thought at the table and those different perspectives."

Dr. Sephus said that AWS has been hiring sociologists and psychologists to join its tech teams to figure out ways to tackle the digital divide by meeting people where they are rather than forcing them to come to the technology.

Simply reframing complex AI/ML topics in terms of everyday actions can remove barriers. Dr. Sephus explained that one way of doing this is to point out that almost everyone has a cell phone, and when you're talking to your phone or using facial recognition to unlock it, or when you're getting recommendations for a movie or for the next song to listen tothese things are all examples of interacting with machine learning. Not everyone groks that, especially technological laypersons, and showing people that these things are driven by AI/ML can be revelatory.

"Meeting them where they are, showing them how these technologies affect them in their everyday lives, and having programming out there in a way that's very approachableI think that's something we should focus on," she said.

Read more from the original source:
How we learned to break down barriers to machine learning - Ars Technica