Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) is organising the first ever AI (Artificial Intelligence) Asia Summit 2018 in Colombo on Wednesday November 7.
This was announced by Jeevan Gnanam, Chairman, SLASSCOM at the launch of the event in Colombo yesterday.
He said the conference would address the topics on Data Science and Machine Learning with many acclaimed international and local speakers such as Timothy Kooi, Head of Data Analytics, DHL Asia Pacific and Dr. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake, Senior Director Technology, MediaTek and many others.
The Summit would be nationally important to Sri Lanka where it would focus on Artificial Intelligence across application, research and adoption, he told the media briefing and said that world renowned speakers in the industry would be addressing the event.
He said that Sri Lanka for the last two decades has relied on two main pillars for its IT/BPM exports which are software development and finance and accounting which served the country to grow 23 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) annually in this sector.
He said that this strategy has served the country well, but indicated that the times are changing and as a middle income country they needed to shift gears and look at increasing the diversity of their exports in climbing up the value chain.
To achieve increased gains, he indicated that now is the time to add another pillar that gives the country another plus which is Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
This would provide 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. He stressed that Sri Lanka should replicate these solutions as exports to other developing countries.
He said that this provides Sri Lanka with the opportunity once again to move beyond providing labour arbitrage solutions to becoming a true, value-added knowledge provider for clients and stakeholders. The AI Asia Summit, he said 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 happy 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," he said.
Ms. Randhula de Silva, Chief Disrupter, SME Sector Development Programme II, Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale (GIZ) GmbH also addressed the media briefing.