Artificial Intelligence Leaders Forum

By Ewell Tan - IEEE Singapore Office and Leo Hwa Chiang - IEEE Singapore Office

There are many technologies nowadays that attract our attention. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of these fascinating technologies. Recognizing the importance of AI for driving enterprise strategies, the IEEE Singapore office brought together the IEEE Communications Society, IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Standard Associations to partner with Alpha Global Network (AGN) to organized an AI Leaders Forum to help participants gain insights about AI and what they should expect from it and how to fit it into their business model.

This forum was held at the ParkRoyal on Beach Road Hotel in Singapore on 15 May 2018. Many high profile AI experts and early adopters shed light on how and where business can apply AI effectively. Prof. Simon Chesterman, Dean of the Law School at National University of Singapore (NUS) chaired the conference. Dr. Ettikan Karuppiah, Director of Developers Ecosystem from NVIDIA, gave an opening keynote speech and shared his views on the leading AI breakthroughs from various industries. Dr. Bin Ma, Principal Engineer from Alibaba, delivered his talk on how speech and language processing are going to transform in the near future. Dr. Thomas Ho, Department Head, Smart Energy and Environment at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) A*STAR, discussed how AI is transforming smart cities and energy around the world, for instance, applying AI to elevators to reduce energy consumption.

After an intensive morning session, participants and speakers had a networking lunch. While the food was delicious, the conversation about AI and Machine Learning (ML) were still carrying on. After the appealing lunch, Chris Auld, Principal Technical Evangelist Manager, South East Asia from Microsoft, presented how to transform business with AI in the cloud.

Machine Learning has been a top business priority for several years, Nikolay Novozhilov, Head of Digital Products from NTUC Link, discussed what are the lessons learned that would make ML projects more valuable to customers. Prof. Uno Takeaki, Principle of the Informatics Research Division/Director, National Institute of Informatics (NII) from Japan, highlighted the important rules of interpretability and how to analyze data using AI from a business standpoint.

Other prominent speakers included Dr. Su Yi, Director of the Corporate Technology Management Office from SMRT; Dr. Lawrence Wee, Chief Data Scientist from Allianz; Su Lian Hye, Principal Analyst from ABI Research; Christopher Muffat, Founder and CEO from Dathena; Jack Saunders, Managing Director & Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Advisory Services from ABI Research; Prof. Daniel Seng, Associate Professor/Director, LLM Programme in Intellectual Property and Technology Law & Information Technology from Faculty of Law, NUS; Prof. Dai Bing Tian, Director, MITB (AI), Assistant Professor from the School of Information Systems, SMU; Prof. Takako Hashimoto, Vice President, Chiba University of Commerce, Director, Institute of Economic Research; and Jace Saunders, Managing Director & Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Advisory Services, from ABI Research.

This forum successfully gathered approximately 140 participants, and the feedback from the audience was very rewarding. Participants gained insightful knowledge from the inspirational presentation by the C-suite speakers.