DataRobot to invest US$11mil to boost Singapore’s AI game

  • Accredited under the national Accreditation@SG Digital programme
  • Solution to the shortage of data scientists is by teaching AI how to do data science

 

DataRobot to invest US$11mil to boost Singapore’s AI game

 

THE Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape in Singapore is about to get interesting as US-based AI firm DataRobot recently announced that it will invest US$11 million (RM45.22 million) into Singapore as part of its expansion plans in the region.

DataRobot will be setting up its regional business HQ on the island nation and plans to expand its advanced AI Research and Development (R&D) centre.

According to the company, at least half of the initial investment will be spent on hiring, with plans to employ up to 50 people by 2019. Most of the staff, at least 40%, will be made up of technical experts and data scientists.

Formed in 2012, DataRobot is a global company with 300 employees, half of whom are data scientists and engineers. It says it has hundreds of customers around the world and its users have built over 300 million predictive models.

“We see Asia-Pacific as a key growth market for us. The rise of the data-driven economy favours corporations which can make better sense of their data to gain a competitive advantage. The future is in AI and we believe Singapore can be the regional centre of this brave new world,” said DataRobot chief executive officer and co-founder Jeremy Achin.

AI has been identified by the Singapore Government as one of the key pillars of technology that it will focus on to keep Singapore economically competitive.

Though the demand for AI and machine learning is dramatically increasing, there are not enough data scientists to go around.

Being a technology company, it only seemed natural that the solution to this shortage is through the use of technology to teach machines how to do data science as there can never be enough data scientists.

“Machine learning is about automation, so we are trying to automate that automation. Doing this, DataRobot’s product empowers employees with deep domain knowledge to perform complex data science work with their automated machine learning platform,” said Achin.

The addition of DataRobot into the Singapore government’s list of AI technology providers under the Accreditation@SG Digital programme – which gives the stamp of approval to cutting-edge tech solution providers which have passed the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) stringent evaluation process and accelerates their growth in the region.

With this in place, the deployment of AI at scale for both government and enterprises would be possible. This would also help alleviate the need for data scientists and thus enable more companies to benefit from AI.

 DataRobot said its technology has been used globally to help insurance companies detect fraudulent claims, businesses set competitive pricing, financial institutions predict loan defaults and many more.

 

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