Kuala Lumpur, 5th August 2021 – Professor Ts. Dr Ali Bin Selamat, the Dean of Malaysia-Japan International Institute of Technology, Kuala Lumpur (MJIIT) delivered UTM’s 108th Inaugural Lecture entitled “Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Software Driven Solutions: Overview and The Future Direction”. More than 300 viewers, including the public audience and UTM staff, participated virtually in a topic that is deemed important especially in the era of the 5th Industrial Revolution.

Prof. Ts. Dr Ali bin Selamat was promoted to Professor of Software Engineering at the age of 38 after beginning his career as a tutor in 1997 at University Teknologi Malaysia. His research interests include data analysis, digital transformation, knowledge management in higher education, key performance indicators, cloud-engineering software, software agents, genetic algorithms, and soft computing. He is co-chairing the IEA/AIE 2021: 34th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering, and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, which is in Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, he is a part of the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (IJAIMIL), IGI Global, the International Journal of Information and Database Systems (IJIIDS), Inderscience Switzerland, and the Vietnam Journal of Computer Science, published by World Scientific Publications.

In his lecture, Professor Ali Selamat stated that the world is already filled with a growing digital gap where the convergence of various technologies, such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is happening at a fast rate. AI utilises big data to isolate hidden patterns and create an environment that could eliminate human error to optimize big data applications for a holistic digital ecosystem. Big data and AI can accelerate the future growth of a post-pandemic world, where businesses could produce data-driven insights towards the rejuvenation of the economy.

Throughout this pandemic, big data and AI play an important role in enabling smoother remote user interaction and analysing health reports in a timely and accurate manner. To add, the emergence of big data can discover hidden patterns inside available data to understand and predict market trends and human behaviour efficiently through AI solutions. In his address, Professor Ali also shared the recent works on applied soft-computing and AI-related software that have been developed. Moreover, the advent of emerging technologies will encourage value-centric and value-based human development to make the industry “smarter” while reducing the threshold of uncertainty in the future.

Also present in the event were Professor Ts. Dr Rose Alinda Alias, who acted as the Chairman and Professor Dr Shamsul Sahibuddin as the reviewer.

Prepared by: Fatin Irdina & Sofea Diyana