By Adnan Rafique
ISLAMABAD: The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Islamabad AI signed a three-year memorandum of understanding (MoU) on Wednesday at an online ceremony to collaborate on the responsible and practical use of artificial intelligence (AI) in policy research, institutional development and sustainable development.
The MoU was signed by Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri, Executive Director, SDPI and Dr Mustansar Ali Ghazanfar, Chief Executive Officer, Islamabad AI who is also an Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of East London.
Speaking on the occasion, Dr Suleri said that AI had become an important part of professional and personal life, and that its value for a policy think tank lay in the speed of analysis, gathering facts and figures, accessing resources and developing policy recommendations.
He said researchers should move beyond treating AI as a tool that simply responds to commands, refine the way they write prompts, and use AI to sharpen their research questions, much as Google was used in the past for gathering information, and for their own synthesis and analysis. He said Dr Kazanfar had promised to support SDPI faculty and researchers in developing and using AI tools.
Dr Ghazanfar described Islamabad AI as a new think tank with members in the United States, the United Kingdom and Pakistan. He said its research themes are responsible AI and governance, the economy and AI, skills and education, and financial technology and digital finance. He said the partnership could go beyond the MoU to include joint research, policy dialogue and sharing of evidence.
The agreement establishes a strategic framework to support the application of AI, digital transformation, data analytics and emerging technologies across SDPI’s institutional, research and programme functions.
The areas of collaboration include: AI-enabled improvement of organisational processes, workflows and programme functions, support for policy evidence collection, data analysis, interpretation, visualisation and presentation, use of AI in research, planning, project management, MERL, reporting and knowledge management, development of AI-enabled analytical tools, dashboards and decision-support systems, guidance on responsible, ethical, secure and effective AI use, with human oversight and verification, periodic capacity building for SDPI staff, researchers, partners and other stakeholders, identification and piloting of new AI applications.
