 Thanks for joining us at the AI for Good Global Summit 2019 and today we are joined by Khalil Amiri, his Secretary of State for Scientific Research at the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research Republic of Tunisia. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for this opportunity. So obviously you represent the government here and it's important isn't it that you have a say and a seat in this multi-stakeholder platform because when it comes to AI and a mass deployment of AI it's going to be a collective effort isn't it? Absolutely, I think AI has massive potential to bring a lot of great impact in various sectors, health, education, industry, public services but at the same time there are a lot of challenges to be able to bring this potential to reality and a lot of concerns from citizens of course about this technology but also a lot of challenges in terms of validating this technology for instance when it is used in sensitive sectors like health so this of course requires a multi-stakeholder approach, government, civil society, experts, scientists so that we can actually together bring the potential of this great technological revolution to society. And to your buzzing start-up scene as well in Tunisia because you have lots of start-ups that are looking at deep learning and other areas of AI Absolutely, this is the point I tried to make in the panel I participated in in the summit which is that AI is a force for good to achieve the SDGs but probably one of the best ways to help also the SDGs is to help raise the income of developing countries by making them also take advantage of the economic opportunity that comes with this technological revolution and that means basically taking advantage of the demographic opportunity what I call the predominantly young population in these regions so that they can also not only be technology consumers but also producers so I invited global tech companies to offshore part of their R&D operations in countries like Tunisia where this is a buzzing start-up scene and a very performing research system because also there are specific challenges local so we can be in AI lab also for development so I invited them to not only think of that part of the world as a market but also as a partner so that we together can deliver solutions and of course if we work together also that will help raise income and reduce inequalities so it's another way also to achieve the SDGs Absolutely, inclusion, ethics, all very important debates that we are having here at the AI for good global summit and you have participated in sessions that are focusing in ethics and health, I understand so tell us more about that Absolutely, I think it's an area where also Tunisia has a lot of potential where our continent Africa has massive challenges as you know probably in some sub-Saharan African countries the number of doctors, 400,000 citizens is a factor of 10, a factor of 1 over 20 of what we see in developed countries so this is already a challenge and with the 1 billion new basically inhabitants of the continent the African continent over the next 20 years the challenges are going to be only greater Tunisia is a hub in terms of exporting medical services we receive hundreds of thousands of patients from Africa and the region and technology and AI can actually help improve the services, diagnose early, reduce stress on already limited medical staff so there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of potential but at the same time we cannot roll out such technologies without being sure actually of their impact and in order to test these solutions we need to compare them to expert opinion of doctors this requires that we have data that's annotated, that's structured so that researchers can test against and also later of course in the validation and roll out the clinical trials of these solutions which are increasingly complex because sometimes it's a medical device, it's also medicine and so it's not just a device and can be also administering advice and also medication so this is quite complex and we'd like to participate in this dialogue we'd like to, we have a very performing research system in the health sector and also in IT we have a hundred year old research institute, institute Pasteur where we have a Nobel Prize, Charles Nicole was buried there from early parts of the 20th century so there's a lot of potential and we offered our help to this initiative AI for Health that's led by the ITU and the WHO so that we can help with this annotation and the piloting so that we can build these databases that are very valuable for researchers because they need to test their solutions and we need to get some doctors to be able to annotate and structure this data that is basically essential for the early research but also for the later validation of these solutions Ok Mr Khalil Amiri, thank you so much for talking to us today, thank you Thank you very much, pleasure