Top Glove participated in MDEC ' s Digital Transformation Lab and achieved encouraging results
academia to further nurture these bright young talents .
Catalysing AI
Malaysia introduced the ‘ Cloud First ’ Strategy to the national agenda , starting with the public sector . Cloud adoption can enable the Government to rapidly deliver innovative public sector services to the rakyat without incurring high levels of capital expenditure in the IT infrastructure , such as data centres , servers and storage .
In a hyper connected world , it is becoming abundantly clear that artificial intelligence ( AI ) is the defining force of the fourth industrial revolution . AI is the natural progression from data analytics , and as such , Malaysia will develop a National AI Framework . This will be an expansion of the National Big Data Analytics ( BDA ) Framework , and its development will be led by MDEC . AI could well be a ‘ game changer ’ in improving the lives of Malaysians .
Malaysia City Brain In January this year , Malaysia introduced a highimpact initiative to catalyse the AI ecosystem and open up the path for collaborative innovation : The Malaysia City Brain . This is an open datadriven , artificial intelligence platform adapted from Hangzhou City Brain , which has been designed to meet local needs . It uses artificial intelligence as a platform to address urban challenges and offers intelligent solutions to the community in Kuala Lumpur . The platform uses Alibaba Cloud ’ s AI programme as well as big data analytics capabilities to produce real-time traffic predictions using its video and image recognition technologies .
The Malaysia City Brain operates as an open platform whereby it can plug in new and existing solutions from other platform by leveraging prebuilt intelligent tools , incorporating artificial intelligence and Machine Learning , and utilising existing data sets as well as additional data sets from external sources .
Global icons
On the startup side , the Malaysian tech scene is growing and vibrant . There are several Made-in- Malaysia regional champions that we see today : iflix , a three-year-old startup that managed to roll out services to 30 countries and five million customers , while having access to data analytics , artificial intelligence and machine learning . And it is intriguing that iflix does not own servers or data centres . Cloud and digital adoption allows them to be agile and scale fast to meet growing demands while keeping capital expenditure low . Presently , iflix has US $ 179 million in the latest round of funding . We need to see more rapid growing startups like iflix in Malaysia .
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