The #AIEye: Artificial Intelligence Innovation Alive
and Well in #CostaRica - #Stocks discussed: (OTC PINK: $GTCH) (Nasdaq: $INTC)
(NYSE: $G) (NYSE: $WMT) (Nasdaq: $NVDA) (Nasdaq: $MSFT)
Point Roberts WA, Vancouver BC – October 8,
2019 – Investorideas.com (www.investorideas.com), a global investor news source
covering Artificial Intelligence (AI)
brings you today’s special edition of The AI Eye, looking
at AI deployment and development in Costa Rica.
Read
this in full at https://www.investorideas.com/news/2019/artificial-intelligence/10081AIEye-CostaRica-GTCH-INTC-G-WMT-NVDA-MSFT.asp
Picking up steam in 1997 with Intel
Corporation’s (NasdaqGS:INTC) opening of a microchip factory
and an $800 million USD investment, Costa Rica has since blossomed into a key
tech hub in Latin America, according to an article from Nearshore Americas.
But leaving the landmark Intel investment aside (the factory is now closed),
the country is fostering growth through government spending in the space, high
public funds devoted to education and tax-friendly technology parks that
attract investors and talent from around the globe. An excerpt from the
Nearshore Americas article provides a snapshot of the tech space in Costa Rica:
With
a population of five million inhabitants and 51,000 square kilometers, the
number of companies in the country has reached over 546 IT companies, 3,447
manufacturing (including medical components), and performed 12,281 various
commercial activities by 2018. This activity generated over 300,000 jobs,
according to the National Institute of
Statistics and Census.
One of the major fields in the current
technological revolution is artificial intelligence (AI), of which a high
amount of development is occurring in Costa Rica. Intel is currently responsible
for 60 percent of the country’s research and development exports, and according
to a document published earlier
this year, AI-equipped drones “have been deployed by Intel in Costa Rica to
construct models of the forest terrain and calculate the amount of carbon being
stored based on tree height, health, biomass, and other factors”. These drones
are used to capture data which can be applied to solving environmental
challenges.
GBT Technologies Inc., (OTC PINK:GTCH)
a development-stage company developing Internet of Things (IoT) and AI-enabled
mobile technology platforms, is testing its Avant! AI Virtual Agent through GBT
Technologies, S.A., a private Costa Rica-based company. In an interview with
Investorideas.com in August of this year, GBT’s CTO, Dr. Danny Rittman
explained how the company’s relationship with its Costa Rican counterpart was
fruitful and why the firm looks forward to further work in the country.
“The
collaboration with GBT Technologies benefits us by working with a team of
experts in the software and hardware domains. Investing in Costa Rica R&D
capabilities will enable the research and development of our sophisticated
milestones to be faster and of higher quality. We are looking forward to
developments in Costa Rica in our future domains, including autonomous
machines, EDA, IoT, wireless mesh networking and mobile technologies.”
Recently, Rittman addressed the AI space
more broadly, charting its progress from fiction to reality, and outlining
GBT’s scope in AI development:
“Today's
AI technology is transforming how humans and machines work together. That’s why
GBT is investing in the development of the next generation of intelligent
technologies. Because AI has moved from science fiction to our daily lives, we
are focused on meeting today’s technological challenges, and preparing for a
better future. Our AI solutions target a wide variety of domains that will
impact our future, among them medicine, intelligent imaging, communication,
autonomous machines and robotics.
Our
AI capabilities are rapidly evolve towards application's implementation,
creating new horizons in the communication and medicine fields. In the upcoming
year we intend to introduce a new dimension in our daily lives, which is based
on our intelligent technology. Our expert agent will be able to advice humans
about significant topics like medicine and business, enabling new era of humans
and machines collaboration together towards a better future.”
Genpact Limited (NYSE:G) announced plans in August to
open a new finance and accounting (F&A) delivery center in Heredia, Costa
Rica as part of its expanding partnership with Walmart (NYSE:WMT). As per the
partnership, Genpact accelerates Walmart’s digital transformation through the
former’s Cora platform, which “deliver[s] strategic business value to help
companies easily implement AI”, according
to Genpact Chief Digital Officer, Sanjay Srivastava. The news prompted Jorge
Sequeira, Managing Director, CINDE, the economic development agency in Costa
Rica, to comment:
"We
would like to welcome Genpact to Costa Rica. The company's expertise in
advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning,
predictive analytics, and robotics process automation nurtures and enhances
Costa Rica's vision in the knowledge economy, and expands our technological
capabilities to serve the world. We are confident that Costa Rica's talent, our
quick learning skills, and adaptability will contribute to the success of
Genpact as a leader in digital transformation to best serve its global
clients."
GPU-accelerated deep learning – pioneered
by NVIDIA Corporation (NasdaqGS:NVDA), who invented the GPU (graphic
processing unit) in 1999 – is being leveraged in plant identification and
organism classification by the Costa Rica Institute of Technology (ITRC). Specifically,
the Costa Rican team “trained a convolutional neural network on about 260,000
images using two NVIDIA GeForce GPUs, the Caffe deep learning framework and
cuDNN”, according to a NVIDIA blog post. Jose Mario
Carranza-Rojas, a Ph.D. candidate on the ITCR team, spoke to the
indispensability of NVIDIA’s solutions:
“Without
this technology, it would’ve been impossible to run the network with such a big
dataset. On common CPUs, it would take forever to train and our experiments
would have never finished.”
Tech giant Microsoft (NasdaqGS:MSFT) has committed to supporting
Costa Rica’s digital transformation through Cloud and AI technology, according
to The Costa Rican Times.
Microsoft Latin America President, César Cernuda, who led a delegation of Microsoft
executives visiting Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado, said:
“We
have been present in Costa Rica for 24 years, we provide direct employment for
more than 600 people, and we are convinced that technologies such as the Cloud
and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a powerful force capable of creating
more opportunities in the region and in Costa Rica, where the IT market is
predicted to continue growing and there is an advanced innovation ecosystem.”
This was expanded upon by Ineke Geesink,
General Manager of Microsoft Costa Rica:
“Microsoft's
mission is to help people and businesses achieve more. The Cloud, Artificial
Intelligence and the Internet of Things have the potential to amplify human
potential, transforming production processes, business models, jobs and
experience as human beings. This opens up many opportunities for the
development of our country. Once again, we make ourselves available to the
government to accompany them on the path of digital transformation.”
In a comment to Investorideas.com, GBT
Technologies Costa Rica CEO, Salomon Ocon recapitulated the thrust of Costa
Rica’s burgeoning AI space and foreshadowed some of the company’s future
endeavors in the space in tandem with other emerging tech;
“It
is no secret that artificial intelligence looks to be the major technological
milestone of our generation. Years from now, the concept of a machine
developing its almost human-like intelligence will be as familiar as logging in
to any social media platform.
Today,
GBT Technologies Costa Rica is working towards developing technology that’ll
enable AI and machine learning to intertwine with our daily lives, we believe that
blockchain technology and AI will bring enormous benefits to our day to day
transact-ability, from buying products, services or assets to safely storing
methods of payment in a digital, encrypted and highly secured form.
We
will be unveiling within the next few months how this technology will work and
what it will look like, but we’re eager to share this much with you so far.”
For
a list of artificial intelligence stocks on Investorideas.com visit here or become an Investor Ideas member
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