The organisers of the first-ever conference on Artificial Intelligence to take place
within the University of the West Indies system, say the event slated for July 8 to
10 is attracting many positive responses from the academic communities locally,
regionally and internationally.
Dean of Academic Studies at UWI Five Island Campus, Dr Curtis Charles, is
reporting that scores of experts in AI drawn from academic and from engineering
will converge on Antigua and Barbuda for the conference. “The responses have
been outstanding,” he reported.
Appearing on the Browne and Browne show on Point FM on Saturday, Dr. Charles
revealed that many of the experts who will attend are Caribbean nationals who live
and work outside of the region.
“This would be the first AI Conference in the Caribbean here at UWI FIC; we are
the smallest campus, we are a small country but as the Jamaican say, ‘we little but
we tallawah’. So, when we started planning for this conference, I knew from my
work in the United State, that there were a large number of Caribbean nationals
working at high levels with several tech companies. So, the idea was, if we can get
Caribbean nationals who are high in the technology sphere to come here and talk
about how do we go about re-imagining the digital transformation in the Caribbean
in the age of AI and the 5 th Industrial Revolution, then that would be remarkable,”
he stated.
According to Dr. Charles, he started with a single Caribbean expert who works for
IBM in AI and research, from that single person contacts were made with several
other creating a domino effect where up to date more than eighty (80) (mostly from
the Caribbean) such experts have signaled a desire to attend and even to present
papers on the subject.
“In addition to that, we have accepted some forty academic research papers. These
academic papers are from the US, Canada, the other UWI campuses and someone
from as far as Saudi Arabia, who sit on one of the panels,” he revealed.
Dr. Charles also announced that as part of the conference, on Day One, the
university is committed to train 150 teachers in a 5-hour workshop on the use of AI
in the classroom as a teaching and learning tool.
Even with the conducting of the workshop, Dr. Charles, said someone has
volunteered to assist the university in this regard.
