Here's how Qatar is investing in AI research and advanced technology

Qatar FoundationIn June 2018, the US Department of Defense (DOD) made an announcement - or more of an overdue acknowledgement - that largely went under the radar in major international news outlets. The establishment of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) was merely another signal that the world's next vital competition will be for leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) research. In this competition, US dominance is not a sure thing by any means. That's why, over the coming decade, the AI research battle is expected to closely resemble the 1960s space race.In a move reminiscent of the Soviet era, the Russian government is creating an entire city on the Black Sea devoted to AI research, which will house some 2,000 engineers and scientists in isolation to prevent data breaches or the input of tainted data. The Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Command and Control Technologies is China's answer to the JAIC. China has the technical expertise and money to rival the US in development, while being far less constrained by ethical questions.Putting military dominance aside, AI research is expected to be the next big economic driver in the global economy and add something in the range of $13 trillion in economic benefits by the year 2030, according to a study recently released by the McKinsey Global Institute - but only to those countries who are on the cutting edge of research. The study also concluded that those countries who aren't in the game already will be the big losers in terms of reaping the benefits of AI. It's a long game, and building research capacity takes decades.Qatar's getting into the AI gameThe State of Qatar is very much in the game in terms of AI research. In the past couple of decades, Qatar has been quietly building a massive research and development sector and hiring the best talent from all over the world to build its own human capacity. This is the result of a remarkably prescient strategy to remake the country into a hotbed of learning and research.In 2004, Qatar Foundation invited Carnegie Mellon University to establish a branch campus in Education City, in Doha. The Pittsburgh-based university was the first academic institution to conduct research into AI and is now, along with MIT, one of the two global leaders in the field. Qatar National Research Fund has since awarded over $40 million in research grants to the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar.In 2010, Qatar Foundation created Qatar Computing Research Institute, which was folded into Hamad Bin Khalifa University - a Qatar-based research university - about three years ago. QCRI now has around 100 scientists, software engineers, postdocs, and research assistants working on AI and is regularly ranked highly in computer science ratings. It recently announced the launch of the Qatar Center for Artificial Intelligence, but has been developing AI research for years.QCRI conducts cutting-edge research in the areas of Arabic language technologies, cybersecurity, data analytics, and social computing. It's working with organizations like MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL), the Berlin Big Data Center, and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.One of QCRI's researchers is Dr. Preslav Nakov, a Bulgarian who earned his MSc from Sofia University and a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. Nakov was a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore before joining QCRI.How AI is fighting 'fake news'While the world's superpowers use AI research to develop strategies, weapons, and counterstrategies for military dominance, there is a multi-dimensional information war being conducted between nation states, political parties, and a plethora of other entities. The deadly ammunition being used for the battle of the minds is fake news or disinformation. It was used by the Russians with great effect in the 2016 US presidential election, and most commentators agree it was an outsized influencer in the UK Brexit vote in 2015, and the recent French and Italian elections.The algorithms that detect an individual's taste in news can easily lead someone down the garden path towards an information bubble where everything that is presented as news merely reinforces pre-formed opinions and, in fact, radicalizes a belief system until that person is truly looking through a glass, darkly.Preslav Nakov and his colleagues have made it a mission to counter fake news and propaganda with AI. It's a subject not only of recent concern to the Gulf region, but also in Europe, where the European Union has been desperately trying to counter false propaganda emanating from Russia, the Balkans, North Africa, and the Levant. The EU's East and Arab Strategic Communications Task Forces (Stratcomm), the UK Home Office's Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), NATO's Strategic Center of Excellence and the US State Department's Global Engagement Center are all focused on fighting fake news and propaganda in real time.Speaking to the EU Observer, Jakub Kalensky, a member of the EU's East Stratcomm Team, says Russia is conducting an orchestrated campaign targeting millions of people in the EU and the Euro-Atlantic space on a daily basis using the method of repeating a lie a hundred times until it becomes truth.It is naive to expect that a team in Brussels will quickly spot a story, Kalensky adds. The more local the team, the faster the reaction. If there would be an anti-propaganda center in every EU country, it would be much more effective, probably.Nakov and his team know that millennials access news on their mobile phones, so they have been focusing on developing an app that identifies the source of news and rates it immediately in terms of honesty and political orientation.The problem with fake news is not that what is stated is false, but that it has been weaponized, says Nakov. Now that their effectiveness has been demonstrated in several election campaigns, we should expect more and more political actors to give it a try.Yet I am an optimist: Fake news is like spam on steroids. We have managed to put spam under control; we will beat fake news too.The working title of one of Nakov's latest anti-fake news mobile apps is NewsGlass. The app has been adapted to English and Arabic, but the intention is to expand it to several other languages.On another note, QCRI and BADR, a software company, developed an app used before the 2016 US presidential elections called TweetElect.com. Months before the 2016 US presidential election, they noticed that Donald Trump had been getting more tweet traffic and support than Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign. QCRI was also involved in the research and development of a speech recognition and translation application used by Al Jazeera and currently under review by other international broadcasters.The war for AI talentThere are an estimated 90,000 people in the world who are capable of AI research, but only a couple of thousand who can develop that research into real-world applications, so the competition for talent in the field is complex. Leading AI countries, according to McKinsey, will capture 20 to 25% additional growth compared to countries who lag in AI research.Qatar's ambition is to develop local expertise in machine learning, and become both a global leader and the dominant force in the Gulf region within this field. To that extent, exposure to AI research is being incorporated into secondary education in the country; QCRI is already holding AI camps during the summer months to develop interest and talent in the country.One thing the scientists at QCRI are quick to point out is that the mythology of AI has little to do with the reality of the subject. AI engenders thoughts of computers eventually replacing humans and therefore rendering biological life redundant in some dystopian version of the future. Nothing could be further from the truth.There is a big difference between 'General AI' and 'Narrow AI', explains Prof. Michael Wooldridge, head of the computer science department at Oxford University and a scientific advisor to QCRI. General AI is the world of HAL 9000 in Arthur Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It doesn't exist in real life and is really on the fringe of the contemporary AI research. 'Narrow AI' is where the real action is.Narrow AI is getting machines to do specific tasks that people can do which machines currently can't, like automated translation, he says. The things we should be losing sleep about when it comes to AI are potential unemployment, dislocation and inequality resulting from machines displacing people who do repetitive tasks.We also have to worry about privacy, fake news, altered reality, autonomous weapons, algorithmic bias, and algorithmic alienation - can you imagine having an algorithm for your boss?Find out more about how Qatar is leading research for AI and other technologies. This post was created by Qatar Foundation with Insider Studios.