World-renowned speakers such as Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu; Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra; and Rousseeuw Statistics Award winner Miguel Hernán, have met this week at the ADIA Lab Symposium, the first major symposium held in Abu Dhabi, to promote collaboration between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Spain in order to generate synergies and promote the presence of foreign research centres in Spain, while at the same time fostering collaboration between the Middle East and Europe through Spain.
The University of Salamanca is one of the few Spanish institutions invited to participate in this grand event and it is part of this luxury line-up thanks to BISITE, since it is this research group, belonging to the University, that has been selected. Specifically, BISITE will contribute its knowledge in the field of the “Digital economy, decentralised ledger technology and tokenisation: New approaches and computational tools to investigate the digital economy and the role of central banks’ digital currencies in the transformation of funding from a centralised to a distributed model”. In this regard, it will receive a first grant of 2 million euros to lay the foundations of an ambitious project aimed at designing macroeconomic models to monitor and model the evolution of the digital economy, tokenisation, and digital currencies worldwide. The Research Group, from the University of Salamanca, will work with prestigious international researchers in the fields of economics, banking and energy and its work will focus on the application of Generative AI and Quantum Computing models. In fact, it is already preparing the organisation of a specialised unit.
As Director of the BISITE Research Group, I have the honour of being one of the speakers at the symposium with a lecture on “Shaping the future: digital economy, distributed ledger technology, and the rise of Generative AI”. This is a tremendous responsibility for me, especially after having listened to renowned experts such as Steven Chu, an expert from Stanford University who, together with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Daniel Phillips, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for their pioneering work on the cooling and trapping of atoms using laser light. Twenty years later, Steven Chu, was chosen by President Barack Obama to serve as US Secretary of Energy.
Jack Dongarra, a prestigious American mathematician and computer scientist recognised worldwide for his contributions to high-performance computing using innovative approaches; Korea’s Soh Young In, distinguished for her research on Financial Innovation at the Sustainable Finance Initiative (SFI) of the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy; and Luis Seco, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto and Director of Risklab, a University laboratory for quantitative finance research, with a strong focus on asset management and a deep concern for sustainability and climate change. For this reason, among the lab’s objectives is the use of artificial intelligence to address today’s sustainability challenges.
Carme Artigas, the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence at the Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation, is also present at the symposium, the architect of the agreement under which the pioneering research centre ADIA Lab has chosen Spain to establish its European headquarters, promoting cutting-edge research programmes in five areas and offering a programme of advanced training and development of industrial use cases.
It is a great honour to have the opportunity to hear first-hand from leading experts in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies at the ADIA Lab symposium, which is supported by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) and whose advisory board is made up of leading data and computational scientists.
