Focus on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity

Manama : Artificial intelligence and cybersecurity were in focus at the Innovation Forum, which opened yesterday as part of the Technology Week.

The two-day event kicked off with the participation of over 500 entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers, along with senior officials from the world’s leading tech companies as well as policymakers.

The event will highlight the latest trends in state of the art and disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, financial technology, autonomous driving, and cloud computing. It is being organised by the MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab, in partnership with Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) and Investcorp.

Yesterday’s talks focused on artificial intelligence by Denis Batalov, Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services and two-panel sessions on ‘Cybersecurity: How to protect your brand, product and data online and offline’ and ‘Autonomous Driving: So close yet so far’. Cybersecurity experts Gilbert Kamieniecky Richard Cremona, Najwa Aaraj, Martin Wülfert and autonomous car technology experts Wendell Wallach Mark Haidar, Dr Georges Aoude, Nicolas Olivier spoke on the occasion. Reflecting on the rise in cybercrimes Aaraj said, “There are multiple reasons for this, firstly the technology available to those who attempt these crimes are better and more sophisticated.”

“The second reason is that we have increasing connectivity now, there are more computers connected to the network,” he said adding: “Everything has become interconnected, it is no longer a situation where the systems are standalone.”

In this regard, he also warned that it would be easy to hack into one system and get into the next one, “by having multiple systems on the same network.”

“The hacker may not find sensitive information on the first system he attacks but he can keep going on in the network until he finds a system with the data that he wants.” 

Today, Wendell Wallach, consultant, ethicist, and scholar at Yale University will give a keynote speech and the panel session for the day will be on FinTech with Remy Kesrouani Safwan Shah, Niall Clauberg and John Defterios as the speakers.