08
SPOTLIGHT
Back to Contents
THE IT SOCIETY / Issue 04/2017
Shaping an AI-Powered Nation KOO SENGMENG Deputy Director (Strategic Alliances), AI Singapore Age: 44 First Brush with Technology: 10 years old First Tech Experience: Apple IIe Clone Computer Currently Reading: Books from David Weber, Timothy Zahn and Peter F Hamilton Pet Topic of the Moment: AI and Mixed Reality
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a thing of the now, and the rate of change and developments in the domain reaffirms that. An active advocate of AI development in Singapore, Koo Sengmeng, Deputy Director of Strategic Alliances, AI Singapore, sheds light on how beyond changing the way we live, work and play; AI has the potential to propel the continued growth of our economy.
Q: Question, SM: Sengmeng Q: Did AI only come about in the recent years? SM: Certainly not. If you think about the recommendation engines from the likes of Amazon, Google and Baidu? Or your email spam detector? And more recently, phone personal assistants like Siri and Google Now. Many of them have been around for a while now – and even become features that we rely on. Q: Then why is there increasing interest in AI in the recent years? SM: I always like to refer to my personal view of the “holy trinity” – Compute, Algorithm and Data. Affordable computing power such as Graphic Processing Unit (GPU), coupled with the development of cloud-based machine learning platforms by major tech companies – Alibaba Cloud Aliyun, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Google Cloud – means that individuals and businesses can easily host
and run Al projects that use machine learning techniques. Concurrently, frameworks and tools such as Caffe and Tensorflow help accelerate the development of AI applications while software such as NVIDIA DIGITS help jump-start beginners who are keen to explore this domain. But of course, AI will not be able to take off successfully without data. Data is necessary to fuel the advancement of the AI engine. Thanks to the proliferation of smart phones and smart devices, huge amounts of data spanning different facets of our global digital economy is being created at an unprecedented speed. The synchronic growth of these three aspects have not only empowered AI applications to be developed at an accelerated rate to benefit people, but also drew much interest among developers to explore the potential of AI.