The Minister of Communications and Information Technology Amr Talaat has inspected the projects implemented by the Applied Innovation Center (AIC) for adopting modern digital technologies in various fields and finding innovative solutions to the challenges facing Egyptian society.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT) established the AIC in April 2020. The Center aims at developing the application of modern ICTs, including but not limited to: Artificial Intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, robotics, Fifth Generation (5G) Networks, and others. The AIC also aims at developing human capital through allowing youth to participate in applied research projects while creating the appropriate climate for the growth of startups. The Center includes about 55 experts specialized in ICT.
Talaat met with the supervisor of the AIC Ahmed Tantawy, Advisor to the ICT Minister for Research and Development Noha Adly, the executive management and officials of the projects implemented by the AIC and its employees. The youth working in the projects reviewed the results of the work and the most prominent achievements in the projects. Moreover, Talaat was briefed on the applications developed by the AIC in cooperation with partner agencies.
During the meeting, Talaat stressed the keenness of MCIT to pay great attention to research and development and to establish global partnerships to build Digital Egypt according to the latest technologies. He pointed to the vital role of the AIC in using the latest ICTs to develop innovative applications and solutions that effectively contribute to accelerating the pace of transformation into an integrated digital society and keeping pace with global technological developments, in addition to enriching digital skills and preparing specialized competencies by participating in applied research projects.
The meeting witnessed a review of the implementation status of a number of projects implemented by the AIC, most notably the development of an Egyptian application that uses AI in diagnosing diabetic retinopathy with an accuracy of more than 95%, based on a field study conducted by the AIC in cooperation with the Faculty of Medicine at Alexandria University, in which 10 thousand diabetic patients were examined in several governorates. The AIC began working on the project in April 2020.
Moreover, the team of the AIC is currently developing the general plan for the initiative to early detect diabetic retinopathy for one million citizens. Furthermore, coordination with the Supreme Council of University Hospitals immediately began after approving the budget for implementing the campaign through university hospitals in 11 universities, covering all governorates of the Republic.
Furthermore, the project to identify agricultural lands and types of crops planted using AI techniques was also discussed. It is implemented in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation (MALR), and aims at analyzing satellite images using AI techniques to draw the boundaries of the cultivated areas and determine the types of agricultural crops planted in them. The first phase of the project ended, as the team built an application to determine the areas, varieties and conditions of agricultural crops in a number of governorates. The next phase will cover the interactive rationalization of irrigation water use, early detection of pests and determine the expected productivity of crops.
The ICT Minister listened to a detailed explanation about the Natural Language Processing (NLP) project. This research and development project aims at using AI technologies to provide technical solutions capable of understanding and translating Arabic sentences spoken in the Egyptian colloquial dialect into sentences spoken in other languages (such as Chinese and English) and vice versa. The training of the team on the latest methods used globally in the fields of speech recognition and machine translation among languages has been completed. Work is underway to train the team in the Multilingual Machine Translation system, and to develop the Automatic Speech Recognition system for spoken Egyptian colloquial Arabic in its various dialects and automatic speech generation applications in those dialects (Text to Speech Synthesis).
Talaat was briefed on the most prominent achievements that were implemented in the supercomputer project. The supercomputer was qualified to deal with giant applications that require superior computational ability and a large amount of data was launched. Also, the computer includes 48 modern graphic processing units (GPUs) that meet the needs of AI applications, especially those that use deep machine learning methods. Furthermore, the AIC engineers carry out the technical tasks of operating the device and building and developing similar systems suitable for training and conducting experiments.
