Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1181032
31.10.19 10 INTERVIEW 'Malta ideal place to launch and MASSIMO COSTA Malta recently launched its National AI Strategy. What is the vision for the country? And does the government have a role in enabling this? e Vision, as set by the Prime Minister, is to make Malta one of the top 10 countries in the world with regards to Artifi- cial Intelligence advancements. is was the brief that guided us when we were drafting the Malta.AI National Strategy. e various components of the strategy are divided into two; the enablers and the stra- tegic pillars. e enablers are the fundamental components which make up the strategy. Without them, we cannot build AI systems. ese include the underlying infrastructure, the legal & ethical framework and the education and workforce enabler. e strategic pillars rely upon the fundamental components. ese include the private sec- tor, the public sector and the investments (which includes start-ups and innovation). To- gether, the different elements make up the AI launchpad strategy. e general idea is to make Malta the ideal place from where to test and deploy AI solutions worldwide. Gov- ernment has a big role to play in this strategy because it is providing the necessary boost, which our country needs in or- der to gain the necessary mo- mentum. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Neural Networks ... These are just some of the names used to describe some of the things that have been worked on since the 1950s. So why all this hype about AI now? What has changed? AI has been around for the past 70 years, but the bulk of it has been secluded to the labs of research institutions. However, in the past decades, two things changed. We have experienced some impressive advancements in both the software and the hardware of AI systems. Algo- rithms which have been around for 50 years and which had reached the limits of their ca- pabilities were improved upon and a new breed of algorithms called Deep Learning emerged. ese algorithms mimic more closely the internal workings of the brain. e improvement of these algorithms has been so profound that AI is managing to surpass human performance in most tests. But these algorithms are ex- tremely power-hungry and re- quire huge processing power. During the same period when these algorithms were being developed, a new kind of pro- cessor was becoming popular. is processor is known as the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and (as its name sug- gests) it is designed to handle the graphics found in games. However, AI researchers re- alised that the GPU can be ideal for AI too and in fact, it is heavily being used for high- end processing. In some cases, the GPU can offer up to 100% speed-up over traditional pro- cessors. If that is not enough, we also have Cloud technology; which is essentially a farm of processors located somewhere remotely. e benefit of Cloud processing is that one can add or remove processors based on need. is combination of better algorithms and powerful hardware is currently driving this AI revolution which we are experiencing today. With Malta's limited R&D budget, what kind of AI is it possible to create in Malta? Really and truly, we can cre- ate any kind of AI. Considering that most of the processing is performed on the Cloud, we are not limited by the lack of processing power, since we use remote machines. e ad- vanced algorithms required for AI are all available and in fact, they are already taught at University. is means that we are already at a very advanced stage. We have projects in the manufacturing industry to- gether with multinationals. Others are in health, together with different departments of Mater Dei. A lot of projects deal with the processing of big data and the prediction of fu- ture trends. We are constantly training AI experts in order to meet the demand which cur- rently exists. So we are posi- tioned very well as a country. However, we can always do more. e R&D budget is very limited and needs to be boost- ed further. e government is aware that we can never compete with the big players like China which is investing around $100 billion on AI, but there are niche areas where our size plays in our favour. at is why the National AI Strategy focuses on the concept of the AI launchpad – because solu- tions are tested in a controlled sandbox, within the context of an entire country and then launched to the world. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said: "The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast ... You have no idea how fast it is growing; at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeframe. 10 years at most." ...Can artificial intelligence be dangerous? AI is essentially a tool. To be precise, it is the most powerful tool ever invented by man. Like any other tool, it can be used to do good or to do really bad stuff. However, even though AI is progressing at a very fast pace, we are also aware of its limitations. In fact, the AI we have so far is normally re- ferred to as Narrow AI. is means that the AI is exception- ally good at solving a particu- lar problem but really bad at solving a generic one. Imagine, you're playing chess against the AI. e chess program is prob- ably at a level of a chess grand- master or even better. However, if you ask the chess program information about the weather, it will not give you an answer. e reason being that it is only an expert at playing chess and at nothing else. In fact, the holy grail of AI is what is known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) whereby the AI is capable of handling differ- ent situations in a similar way to humans. However, AGI is still very far away and it is very unlikely that we'll see it in the near future. Professor Alexiei Dingli is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the Department of AI within the University of Malta. He has been conducting research and working in the field of AI for the past two decades and formed part of the Malta. AI task-force, chairing the working group on education and workforce. He spoke to BusinessToday about his vision for an AI-embracing Malta in the years to come