Ecosystem Overview: Bangkok
I. Why Bangkok?
Bangkok was my first stop in way back in December on a tour of Southeast Asia. Technically, I was there on holiday, but I enjoy seeing what type of meetups or innovation events take place when I’m away from home. Luckily, I stumbled upon Bangkok’s Data Science BKK meetup hosted by the Bangkok’s School of AI and Cryptonist, Bangkok’s local blockchain meetup.
This was probably my favourite meetup group I’ve ever been to on this planet. Why? Well, the group’s mantra is explicitly described as the “least bullsh*t-tolerant data science meetup”. Second they had a lit 🔥 lineup of talks by industry practitioners including a chat on “Data Science from Scratch: How to Learn Data Science for non-IT People” by Mo Pongtachchai, Geologist at Chevron followed by a discussion “Let The Artists Do Their Work! How Data Will Help Music Industry?” by Alan Choicharoon, Data Scientist at University of Leeds. The talks were very engaging and insightful to learn how machine learning is being applied to industry solutions in Thailand.
II. Corporate Research
Similar to other ecosystems, Bangkok’s corporates are championing the application of artificial intelligence to their business operations. As mentioned above, Mo Pongtachchai discussed the use case of machine learning applied to mining sites at Chevron. Chevron Thailand even announced a $30M commitment to create the Thailand Partnership Initiative, which is a 5-year program to boost innovation across the country. Other corporates, like Siam Commercial Bank (SCB), are cognizant of the value AI has on the personal finance front. However it wouldn’t be a party without the big tech companies, like IBM being involved. Just last year, IBM announced the appointment of one of Thailand’s leading ladies in ML, Patama Chantaruck, as their Vice President for Indochina Expansion and Managing Director of IBM Thailand.
III. Research Institutes
If we wanna talk about research institutes, NECTEC would be the OG institute in Bangkok. The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center (NECTEC) is the leading government body for technology in Thailand. NECTEC has been around since 1986 and conducts research and development electronics and computer technologies. NECTEC bridges the gap between research communities and enterprise applications through industrial programs. In its early years, one of NECTEC’s notable projects was the Multilingual Machine Translation Project whose main goal was to develop a machine translation system that can translate speech in a variety of languages like Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Japanese.
Speaking of research — there’s a very well-written research report published by researchers Boonserm Kijsirikul (Chulalongkorn University) and Thanaruk Theeramunkong (Sirinthorn International Institute of Technology, Thammasat University) called Survey on Artificial Intelligence Technology in Thailand. The report was published in 1999 and was very much ahead of its time. The authors surveyed a handful of research institutes and universities. The findings include insights on how many institutes did research and/or apply research to real world applications; 77% of institutes (back in 1999) did research on AI, while 23% did not. The areas of research in AI included Speech Processing, NLP, Expert System, Image Processing, Machine Learning, and Robotics to name a few. Speech processing and natural language processing were the most popular research areas in Thailand in 1999.
IV. Universities
As one of South East Asia’s largest cities, Bangkok is home to some of Thailand’s top universities. Similar to California’s UC system, Bangkok has a collection of universities through King Mongkut’s University of Technology in multiple locations like North Bangkok, Ladkrabang (eastern district in Bangkok), and Thonburi (southwestern district). King Mongkut’s University of Technology in Thonburi’s (KMUTT) research program in ICT and applied mathematics conducts research in computer vision, image analysis, speech and signal processing, and machine learning. KMUTT also hosted the Deep Learning and Machine Learning Workshop.
Over in Ladkrabang, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang announced a bachelor’s program in robotic and AI partnering with universities around the globe like University South Florida, Imperial College, Kumamoto University. The goal is to prepare students to be ready for the 21st century where robotics and AI will become an essential part of daily life.
On par with KMUTT is Chulalongkorn University. Chulalongkorn has 15 research labs and notable researchers like Peerapon Vateekul who heads the Machine Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery Lab (MIND Lab), Ekapol Chuangsuwanich who focuses on Automatic Speech Recognition at the Spoken Language Systems Lab.
V. Trailblazers: Bangkok’s Leading Ladies
When I visited Bangkok, I was excited to see that there’s a local Women Who Code chapter — though I’m still not sure if they have a Women in Machine Learning chapter or not. Every time I travel to an ecosystem, I always try to find out who the trailblazers are. Having asked around and researched, two big names came up. The first is Dr. Warasinee Chaisangmongkon who is a lecturer at the Institute of FIeld roBOtics (FIBO) at KMUTT, which has a lit robotics program. Dr. Chaisangmongkon’s research focuses on analyzing neurophysiological data and utilizing machine learning algorithms in conjunction with large scale numerical simulations to model cognitive functions of the brain. She was also a mentor for the Deep Learning Winter School. Another honorable mention from Chulalongakorn’s Engineering program is Thanarat Horprasert Chalidabhongse whose research focuses on image and video processing, human motion understanding, real-time vision. Both researchers’ publications warrant a thorough read.
VI. Show me the Meetups
As Thailand’s biggest city, it’s no surprise that Bangkok is home to some bad-ass meetups, events, and study groups. Last winter, the IEEE-Computational Intelligence Society Thailand Deep Learning and AI Winter School in Bangkok in December. The 4-day long events consisted of lecture talks and workshops on topics ranging from Advances in Deep Learning to AI and Brain-like Learning Systems. Due to high demand, they hosted another DLAI Winter School in partnership with the Asia Pacific Neural Network Society in February.
The Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence (DLAI) Winter School caters to students, engineers, and researchers who may have some basic knowledge of machine learning and AI. The event ran in congruence with the 2018 International Conference on Advances in Information Technology, the International Conference on Computational Systems-Biology and Bioinformatics, and the Joint Symposium on Computational Intelligence held in Bangkok.
- City.ai Bangkok is a local chapter of the greater City.ai organization focusing on successfully applying AI to various industries as well a hosting peer-to-peer sessions on ML, NLP, and Computer Vision.
- School of AI Bangkok is part of Siraj Rival’s global network of study groups focusing on teaching AI education. The Bangkok group has hosting some great workshops on reinforcement learning like January session on Continuous Control with Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient
- For other meetups in BKK check out Data Science Thailand, Bangkok Machine Learning, or Kaggle Bangkok.
Thank you for reading. As this is an ongoing project, I welcome feedback. If you happen to live, research, or work in one of the ecosystems covered here and notice something is off or missing, LMK! #dontbeaTROLL
