The SLASSCOM AI Asia Summit hosted by the Sri Lanka Association for Software and Services Companies (SLASSCOM) will be held on at The Kingsbury Hotel on Wednesday, November 7 from 8.30 a.m. – 5.30 p.m.
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.
Dr. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake will speak on ‘Inspirational Applications of AI for Sri Lanka’. He was recently recognised by Jeff Bezos, Founder/CEO of Amazon, for his memorable accomplishments while at Princeton University.
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.
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 stated, “Sri Lanka for the past two decades has relied on two main pillars for its IT/BPM export; that is Software Development and Finance and 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”.