By Maloy Kumar Dutta and AKM Kamal Uddin Chowdhury
DHAKA, March 13, 2020 (BSS) – Bangladesh is in the perfect position to acquire the value of artificial intelligence (AI) as the country has been making significant progress in digitizing services to turn into a digital nation.
“Potential value of AI is heavily depending on the situation of digitized data. So, it is perfect time to initiate data driven decisions using AI for Bangladesh,” said Dr Khairul Chowdhury, chief technology officer of US-based Intelligent Design Through Automation, Research and Experience (IDARE) in an email interview with BSS.
AI is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems.
“Use of AI optimizes cost, time and resources for people, industry and organization,” he said.
The Bangladesh-origin US technology expert recently supervised a research on ‘Big Data to Actionable Intelligence: A Solution Roadmap for Bangladesh’, where detail survey was made about the data situation.
According to the survey, the government took 12 digital initiatives that produced 600 terabyte (TB) of data related to demographics, financials, socioeconomics, educations and environments of the people.
It is worth mentioning that the first world countries, seated on digital data for last 20 years, took initiatives to make data driven decisions only a couple of years back, he said.
In that respect, he said, if Bangladesh can initiate using AI to make actionable decisions now, they will not be far from the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“I expect Bangladesh to be ahead of many developed countries if they initiate utilization of AI,” he said.
Asked what will be the changes to the country’s economy through AI, he said for any economy, uncertainty is a key mechanism of losses or to restrict growth, an economist can tell it better.
“What AI brings is predictability or better visibility of the future, which is a breakthrough. This predictability helps you manage your resources better, which is key to growth of Bangladesh where resources are limited,” he said.
Asked which sectors are highly potential for AI in Bangladesh, he said all sectors both public and private are highly potential for AI in the country and surprisingly, the government sectors are very well positioned which is the other way for the first world countries like USA and Europe.
“You have to appreciate the current government for this gift. So, governance using AI possesses a very high potential,” he said.
The IT expert said better governance with tackling communicable disease like dengue, prediction in health sector, school performance improvement, automated traffic law enforcement to eradicate traffic jam, asset integrity management for industries and power demand prediction and generation control could bring tremendous return on investment for all these sector.
Replying to another question about the potential limitations or setbacks of AI in the economy, as people fears job losses, he said such fear sometimes comes up in advanced countries like the USA where work process is already very efficient but a developing country like Bangladesh is already suffering from lack of highly skilled labor.
“In this case, AI can help growth tremendously and augment people’s power,” he added.
Chowdhury, however, said the main concern is not job losses rather wrong implementation of AI, which is a very serious issue.
“AI is like fire, if one doesn’t implement with high skills and experience it could burn the whole thing and can be catastrophic. So, AI should only be implemented by experts,” he suggested.
Referring to recent works in Bangladesh from IDARE, he said it was a tremendous pleasure to help Bangladesh in e-governance as a tribute to Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
He said IDARE began experimentally providing analytics in three sectors — resource managing in education sector using AI for BANBEIS, dengue tracking and prediction, and disaster management visual analytics with A2I.
For education sector IDARE’s predictive analytics computation system was able to identify some key mechanisms behind SSC failure for Dhaka and Cumilla and was able to predict school’s pass rate with 96% accuracy, he added.
He said such accuracy helps formulating architecture to manage resources effectively to improve school performance.
For communicable diseases like dengue, he said, IDARE built a visual analytics platform to track dengue and currently building a dengue prediction model using AI.
In other effort, IDARE is providing a visual analytics dashboard for tracking disaster and its management with a2i (access to information), he added.
He, however, said all the technologies are going under experimentation and will require maturation to deploy.