LAHORE: Pakistan's pioneering Artificial Intelligence Advisory and Incubator ADDO AI was launched on Thursday.
ADDO AI will be adding artificial intelligence (AI) that can improve infrastructure and conventional services in various sectors of government.
Artificial intelligence incubator launch in Lahore would connect the AI project sharing with Singapore in first phase and Dubai, and Mumbai in later phases.
The incubator has a team of experts from industry-academia partnership with top AI professors in Pakistan including Dr. Faisal Kamran, Dr. Asim Karim, Dr. Adnan Noon Mian and Dr. Mohsen Ali.
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Dr Faisal Kamiran Director Data Science Lab, an expert on data Science, machine learning, social media analytics and sentiment analysis told The Nation this incubator will creates more jobs for Pakistanis that will be working for foreign companies sitting in Lahore. “We are going to connect this incubator with Dubai and Mumbai so we could have Asia’s one of the effective Artificial Intelligent incubator,” Faisal said.
ADDO is Latin word which means to add something.
“Students of this field will get opportunity to work directly on the industry based problems. We could have done research and predict to Pakistan’s telecommunication companies on what grounds their users are leaving /switching over to other networks. This is all AI,” he said
Citing another example Dr Faisal said AI have lot of potential like in healthcare alone if we were given task to find out which diseases are more prominent in Multan or Southern Punjab, we can build up a system using the existing data and predict certain steps compliance to counter the diseases and reforms in healthcare system alone.
Addo AI is advisory services currently serve global clients SMRT, Singapore’s largest public transportation company.
According to details available with The Nation, Addo AI is working with Singapore’s largest transport company so they could work to build smart cities. “We are building a whole system so people could enjoy the journey with maximum comfort at cheaper rates with an application that will predict safer, cost effective and environment friendly journey connects trains, rails, bikes and cars,” an official informed.
The SMRT project will be launched in Singapore’s top 10 universities first as pilot project and then it will be generalized across Singapore’s transport system.
Dr Asim Karim a PhD scholar from Ohio State University and expert on data mining and social aspects of data analytics said that commercialized based research concept has reached Pakistan and that is something very significant. “In this Artificial Intelligent (AI) incubator we will be using data to build projects for our customers that are user-oriented making lives easier. We will be playing advisory role in these projects,” he said.
“This project is also working on its first local based product micro-insurance for farmers. We are expecting more local based projects and that would be significant move for Pakistan as AI is widely popular science across the globe,” he said.
Vice Chancellor ITU, Advisor to CM Punjab and Chairman Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB) Dr Umar Saif, said while inaugurating the Information Technology University (ITU) Punjab’s first incubator “ADDO AI” Pakistan's first Artificial Intelligence advisory said Pakistan is all set to accelerate the startup activity by commercializing the research and encouraging the faculty for entrepreneurship for the economic growth of the country.
Unlike other universities, ITU allowed 20 percent off to the staff in five working days for entrepreneurial activity to develop cutting edged companies to commercialize the real research while other startups were consumer product driven, he said.
Dr Saif said that there would be no equity or profit sharing by the university and whatever money earned would be theirs. “We aim to link academia, industry and the government, the three pillars of knowledge based economy,” he added.