Augmented Intelligence through Decision Support Platforms

Ahmad Alabdulkareem, Ph.D., is the KACST Director of the Center for Complex Systems (CCS) at KACST and MIT. He earned a Computational Science & Engineering PhD from MIT with a dissertation in the area of machine learning and computational network science under the supervision of one of the most cited authors in computer science; Prof. Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland. His previous studies were at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in computer science, where his research was in the area of machine learning in the Structural and Functional Bioinformatics Group working on enhancing classification algorithms. His areas of expertise include Data Science, AI (Machine Learning (Deep Learning)), Network Science, Statistical Inference, Complex Modeling and Simulation. Over the years, he worked in the intersection of industry and academia, taking ideas from inception, through research and development, all the way to their implementation in the real world. He is also active as an AI consultant, heading multiple private-sector product development projects, in addition to joining various international centers and working groups on AI and smart cities (e.g. the G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance, leading the AI and Smart City projects in the WEF's affiliated Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution in KSA, and recently heading the AI team within the G20’s S20 Engagement Group, etc.).

In the last decade, there has been a huge proliferation of Artificial Intelligence and IoT Technologies within a wide variety of domains, this presentation will demonstrate a few Decision Support Systems that utilize these technologies through an Augmented Intelligence mindset. These are results of some of the research and development projects being conducted at the Center for Complex Systems (CCS), a partnership between KACST and MIT, which is a world-class international center of excellence that strives to uncover fundamental principles and to develop new methods and tools such that complex, highly integrated systems can be modeled, analyzed, and managed more effectively than is possible today. The presentation will go over real-world problems being tackled at the center which span multiple domains such as Energy, Labor, Health, Mobility, and Social systems. Many exciting results and findings will be shown, along with demos of tools developed to solve complex and intractable pain-points of our modern systems. Example applications to be demonstrated range across different sectors, from “Catch-E”, the Electricity Fraud Detection System that maximizes the return on investment (ROI) for inspections, to the “Saudi Skill Space” Tool which shows the Saudi labor skills and jobs (calculating metrics such as automation), and recently the COVID-19 Decision Support Platform which enables decision-makers to simulate, analyze, predict, and visualize different decisions, policies, or scenarios and their effects on a city, supporting both macro and micro-level interventions’ analysis and recommendation.