The Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) is to announce the first-ever SLASSCOM AI Asia Summit to be hosted at The Kingsbury, on November 7 from 8:30 AM – 5:30 PM.
This is Sri Lanka’s first conference dedicated to the topics of Data Science and Machine Learning with many acclaimed international and local speakers addressing the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) across application, research and adoption.
Key international speakers include Timothy Kooi, Head of Data Analytics at DHL Asia Pacific, Dr. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, Senior Director Technology at MediaTek, Dr. Adam Easton, Chief Executive Officer at SimCentric Technologies, Dr. James Shanahan, Founder and Principal of Boutique Data Consultancy, Dr. Rukshan Batuwita, Data Scientist at Google, Dr. Chrisantha Fernando, Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind among others.
Jeevan Gnanam, Chairman SLASSCOM in his vision for an AI Nation, identified Sri Lanka as the island nation that punches above its weight in many categories and the need to add Data Science and AI to that list. He further said, “Sri Lanka for the last two decades has relied on two main pillars for its IT/BPM export; that is Software Development and Finance & Accounting. This strategy has served us well as we grew 23% CAGR year on year for the last decade. However, times are changing. As a middle-income country we need to shift gears and look at increasing the diversity of our export-based basket of goods while climbing up the value chain. It’s time to introduce a new pillar, one that offers exponential gains, the third pillar of Data Science and AI as this provides Sri Lanka with the opportunity in the next few years to lay the solid foundations of being an important thought leader in the South Asian context”.
Jeevan Gnanam said that Sri Lanka should strive to replicate these solutions as exports to other similarly placed developing countries. This provides Sri Lanka with the opportunity once again to move beyond providing labor arbitrage solutions to becoming a true, value-added knowledge provider for clients and stakeholders.
The AI Asia summit will be a catalyst for this vision and raise awareness across industry, government, universities and private institutions of the opportunity ahead and what must be done now, in order to make this a reality. This event will culminate with the release of a Proposed AI Policy which will outline Sri Lanka’s vision for the next five years. “I’m elated to find so many Sri Lankans who are leading the research and development efforts of corporates and technology companies in the Data Science, Analytics and Machine Learning space,” Gnanam said.
SLASSCOM is also pleased to host Dr. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake at AI Asia 2018 to deliver a keynote on “Inspirational Applications of AI for Sri Lanka”. He was recently recognized by Jeff Bezos, Founder/CEO of Amazon, for his memorable accomplishments while at Princeton University. Since then, Yasantha has 94 patents filed in the US, a great testament of the nation’s talent and potential. His work and research interests include developing Machine Learning/AI algorithms and Computer Vision systems for energy constrained embedded devices and innovative applications and AI algorithms for human presence, motion and gesture detection.
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