South Africa is joining global non-profit organisation, City.AI, which organises gatherings of artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners on a quarterly basis across over 40 cities to share challenges and lessons in applied AI.
SA is the newest member of the organisation and Cape Town will host its first City.AI event on 27 March. City.AI also plans to announce events in Lagos, Nigeria and Accra, Ghana soon.
City.AI's goal is to make AI better by proactively tackling the issue of application of AI with the right people in cities across the globe using local ambassadors to grow and advance the AI community.
"Our goal is to multiply the AI talent pool and allow for better application of AI globally," City.AI says on its Web site.
The Cape Town event will include talks by industry peers who will share insights and actionable advice based on hands-on experiences applying AI. There will also be peer-to-peer sessions on machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision and clinic sessions for practitioners to share their specific challenges in applying AI.
"Bringing City.AI to Cape Town is a step to creating a bridge to over 50 communities across six continents, as well as the well-connected organisation, companies and educational institutions in each city's ecosystem. South Africa taking a seat at the international table is hugely important. We are global players and this is one way to represent all that we do and are," says Chantal Louw, Cape Town AI ambassador.
The Cape Town City.AI panel will focus on the implications and impact of AI and includes Lethabo Motsoaledi, co-founder and CEO at M&W Design-led Innovation Studio; Neil du Toit, data scientist at Q-Division; David Anderson, senior associate at Cullinan & Associates; and Wiebke Toussaint, data scientist at UCT and founder of Engineers Without Borders South Africa.
"AI has certainly been around for years. It is all the rage at the moment because it's time has finally come," says Motsoaledi. "From healthcare to financial services, AI is providing superhuman powers to people who need to make insightful decisions. Since we certainly cannot avoid the wave, discussions around AI are important as they assist us in demystifying it."
"The boundary of our imagination is defined by what we know. AI already dominates our mobile digital lives. With the expansion of the Internet into the Internet of things, AI will soon dominate our physical lives too. To consider the expansive impact of AI on our collective human future requires us to put aside emotional reactions and consider the full extent to which human-machine collaboration will shape the evolution of intelligence," adds Toussaint.
City.AI believes that by mapping local AI ecosystems and engaging with experts, it can "better connect peers in AI to each other, source and curate local knowledge, and enable more people to learn and collaborate in the field of applied AI globally".
Cape Town AI ambassador Christopher Brian Currin will moderate the panel and says AI is becoming integral to many aspects of people's lives, both in obvious and subtle ways.
"It has potential to further humanity by solving beautifully complex problems that cannot be ignored, and menial tasks that should be forgotten. To realise its potential, it is paramount we have diverse, informed and insightful discussions that not only reflect on the current state, but ultimately define our future," he adds.
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