NUST holds AI conference

Islamabad : Speaking at the Opening Ceremony of the 1st IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) as chief guest, Federal Minister for Science & Technology Chaudhry Fawad Hussain emphasised the critical importance of Artificial Intelligence in the modern era and its role in Digital Transformation, Knowledge Economy and development of smart cities.

Hosted by National Centre of Artificial Intelligence at National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST), the three-day international e-conference concluded on Wednesday, and was virtually attended by participants from all over the world, including USA, UK, China, Japan, Korea, Germany, Estonia, UAE, Norway, Bangladesh etc. NCAI is one of the four centres of excellence established by GoP in Pakistani universities, and two of these – NCAI and National Centre of Robotics & Automation (NCRA) – are headed by NUST.

The Minister asserted that at present the concept of smart cities remains a novel idea in Pakistan, stressing the need for its comprehensive understanding. Highlighting the wide prospects of AI in developing Smart Cities, he praised the lead role of NCAI in fostering AI-related R&D in Pakistan with an emphasis on indigenous technology development for the industry.

The conference covered emerging trends in AI, including Autonomous Systems, Assistive Robotics, Intelligent Systems, Convolutional Neural Networks, Cyber security in AI, Data Fusion, Data Mining & Information Retrieval, Decision Support Systems, Artificial Neural Networks, Biologically-inspired Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare, Natural Language Processing, Speech Understanding, AI Chip and Neurocomputation, Smart City, Intelligent Robotics and AI Ethics/Regulations.