(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Deepak John |The Peninsula
Doha, Qatar: The Qatar Economic Forum (QEF) 2024 is a great opportunity for the innovation sector in Qatar to learn about major trends from a global perspective, said Abeer Al Hammadi, Director of Innovation Center and Economic Development, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU).
Speaking to The Peninsula, Abeer Al Hammadi highlighted how Qatar's startup ecosystem offers a promising home to entrepreneurs and the country continues to gain momentum as a rising startup hub.“Hosting the fourth edition of Qatar Economic Forum is a great success and we hope it will continue for years to come because it helps us working in innovation sector a lot,” she said.
QEF represents an opportunity to promote the Qatari economy globally through highlighting the facilitations it generates in attracting more investments and businesses to the country, as well as increasing confidence in the Qatari economy to ultimately spur the economic growth and accelerate its pace.
Mentioning the launch of Fanar initiative during the opening address of QEF in which big and clean data will be collected for the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Al Hammadi stated at HBKU“we have a large number of researchers working on Arabic technology, this is very good news from our perspective.”
The initiative will primarily focus on collecting quality data in the Arabic language, contributing to enriching large linguistic models and preserving the Arab identity.
“We have a very active group in Arabic technology. We have created technologies like speech text one of the best translation technologies and AI models based on Arabic technology. So, such initiative will definitely boost our ability to create AI based businesses and state-of-the-art Arabic technology,” she said.
Al Hammadi underscored HBKU is a research intensive university;“we have more than 350 scientists working on diverse themes of technology including AI, sustainability, precision medicine, progressive education and social progress. Such venues provide great opportunities for our researchers and community.”
Elaborating regarding new technologies in HBKU she said, the Innovation Center was established around 2022 and provides entrepreneurship training for our students and our researcher community. In the Center we are launching a new programme 'Lab of Innovation' which will specifically be catering training lab of innovation and technology commercialisation training for our researchers.
“We also have Reyada programme for our students and faculty. We are about to launch seven startups based on technologies created in the near future,” she added.
“In the recent years, we have seen a lot of push from the government to facilitate entrepreneurship within Qatar and we are very grateful for that. We had the Web Summit which happened few months ago and now with Qatar Economic Forum we have the new visas for investors and entrepreneurs and all of this is encouraging others to start their entrepreneurship journey,” Al Hammadi noted.
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