Dr. Fethi Filali Director of Technology and Research (CTO) at QMIC
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is booming, and its impact is here to stay as the technology has begun producing new solutions and is witnessing exponential increase said an expert.
Speaking to The Peninsula, Dr. Fethi Filali, Director of Technology and Research (CTO) at Qatar Mobility Innovation Center (QMIC) said, AI is booming in Qatar and every year we see many use cases. “We have seen an exponential increase in the AI technology and in terms of real applications that the end user will use it is coming up to speed. Recently, we have seen, ChatGPT which is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.”
“AI is booming, and its impact is here to stay and expand. In Qatar we have seen the adoption with many users - Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy (SC), defence and security, and Ashghal. The real benefit of AI can be seen when it comes to automating the system and making life easier and things automated instead of having operators looking at the screen to all that camera feeds can do, they can focus more on the analysis part,” he added.
“QMIC was founded in 2009 and from day one we started on working and developing a sophisticated system about intelligent mobility and traffic monitoring. One of our recent engagements in Qatar was with Ashghal which started in 2019 and last year with SC,” Dr. Filali noted.
“The aim was to develop specific services and applications, dashboards and analytics to be used for their operations and maintenance center. Also, to monitor real time traffic and journey time in main corridors in Qatar and see the impact of events.”
Citing an example from the World Cup, he pointed out that in preparation of the World Cup, a test event for closure of the Corniche was held through which the impact in terms of increase of the Estimated time of arrival (ETA) or journey time in these corridors was seen. Through this they were able to optimise the timing of traffic signals and junctions and make sure that the traffic is smooth, and the journey time is still acceptable to the commuter.
Dr. Filali further said, “Also, for the SC we had an engagement with them which started during the World Cup last year which is about developing automated system and deploying it in parking lots. It was to monitor the capacity and availability of the parking space in the stadiums which we developed and powered by AI and deployed around stadium. They had access to real time system that is sophisticated dashboard where they were able see real time the availability and optimise operation and guiding fans who were going to matches.”
“This system was expanded during the World Cup to cover all the stadiums and fan zones as well. We used around 75 devices using camera empowered by AI and monitoring the real time and the availability of the parking. In addition to that availability of parking information was integrated into our mobile app - Wain. This application was very successful during the event for people to get access to real time capacity of this parking and asking the Wain app to do the selection of the parking and provide the route to the parking lots,” he added.
Several versions of the Wain mobile application (used by more than 135,000 users during the event) were released and also throughout the tournament. These versions introduced many important features related to the World Cup and enabled an enjoyable fan experience in terms of optimised navigation, accessing real-time parking availability, providing information about, points of interest, the delivery of customized push notifications based on the user interests, and the ability to update road closures and openings in Wain in near real-time. The diverse and rich Wain content and map data were successfully managed through QMIC’s newly developed Content & Alert Management System (CAMS).
“After the World Cup we are shifting the gears, expanding, and extending the systems that we have. One of the sectors we are working on is traffic mobility and analytics. We are also working on financial security, environment and energy. This year we are entering with an operating plan which is user and data centric; our priority is triggered by customer and user needs in Qatar.”
