Malaysia set to harness the power of AI with $1 billion park and scholarship programme
Malaysia amps up in the artificial intelligence race with Malaysia’s first AI park and scholarship programme that will drive technological development in the country.
The park is expected to give a boost to Malaysia’s economy by supporting efforts to enable a commercial AI ecosystem and make advancements in AI research. The billion dollar development will look to grow local artificial intelligence talent by taking advantage of computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing.
This news comes after a study by Microsoft and IDC Asia Pacific, which found that employee productivity is expected to improve by 60% in Malaysia with the help of AI. But despite these developments, we are forced to face the facts, how advanced is AI in Malaysia and what are the main challenges we currently face?
Malaysia’s response to the challenges of AI
The top three challenges faced by business leaders who are adopting AI include a lack of thought leadership and leadership commitment to invest in AI, a lack of skills, resources and continuous learning programmes as well as a lack of advanced analytics or adequate infrastructure and tools to develop actionable insights.
To overcome these issues and encourage growth, Malaysia’s former Minister of Communications and Multimedia, Gobind Singh Deo, introduced the MYINDUSTRY AI Scholarship, an AI-focused Masters funded by the industry, universities, and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).
How has Malaysia used AI?
AI plays a significant role in data aggregation by understanding dark data, data retention and providing data integration for best analytics results. Machine learning, analytics, and AI can objectively identify data that is seldom or never used. This technology can then recommend disposal of the data. For instance, these processes can pick out pieces of data or records that haven’t been accessed for more than five years, indicating that the data could be obsolete.
While these advancements don’t always have the same discernment abilities as humans, this technology can save an employee time hunting down potentially obsolete data because now all they need to do is to determine whether there is any reason to keep it.
Recently, AI made a historic, yet controversial, appearance in Malaysia’s justice system to assist in crunching data and sentencing during two drug cases. Machine learning can make a very manual process more efficient by automatically developing “mappings” between data sources and the application’s data repository. This cuts down integration and aggregation times.
At the backbone of AI lies its critical infrastructure of Cloud and datacenters. The demand for computing power is ever-increasing since the rise of AI. This challenges the ability of existing infrastructure to cope with high density, which is why Malaysia has seen growth in this industry and is tapped as a key location for datacenters.
Consult industry leaders and expert speakers on how AI is the key for IR4.0 and harnessing the power of this revolutionary technology only at the Malaysia Cloud & Datacenter Convention 2020.
Due to the current COVID-19 situation, W.Media will be postponing all its live events that were scheduled in the first half of the year into the later part of 2020. Stay connected with our series of webinars and online private executive briefings at https://w.media/webinar/ .
Follow us on Linkedin and/or Facebook to get the latest updates.