A Kazakh-Belgian AI lab and a telescope from Ghent University: King Philippe visits Alem.ai

On 13 October, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, King Philippe and Queen Mathilde visited Alem.ai, the international artificial intelligence centre in Astana, the Akorda press service reports. The guests toured the museum exhibition, the robotics zone and the AI cinema.

They were presented with Alem.ai’s long-term development strategy, the TUMO Astana education programme and a joint Kazakh-Belgian mirror laboratory for artificial intelligence and mathematics. The lab’s first initiatives are NeuroLearn (research at the intersection of AI, neuroscience and adaptive learning) and ParkScreen (AI methods for the early screening of Parkinson’s disease).

A symbolic moment of the visit was the handover of a telescope from Ghent University to talented Kazakh schoolchildren and students. The telescope bears the autographs of Nobel laureates in physics François Englert, Gerard ’t Hooft and Michel Mayor, as well as Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne.

The day before, at the talks in the Akorda, King Philippe named artificial intelligence among the areas the delegation had come to explore, and at the press briefing he highlighted his interest in visiting Alem.ai. In their Joint Statement, the sides expressed interest in cooperation on artificial intelligence, big data, cloud technologies, supercomputing infrastructure and data centres.