TEHRAN – The roadmap for the development of artificial intelligence (AI) was drafted after a year of scientific work with the participation of academic and industrial figures from both the public and the private sector.

The study of the national artificial intelligence development roadmap document started a year ago at the Research Institute of Information and Communication Technology, which was officially completed by the end of November this year.

The document is presented in two general sections, “application development” and “development of enablers”, Mohammad-Shahram Moein, head of innovation and development center of artificial intelligence at the Research Institute of Information and Communication Technology, said.

Iran is in 13th place among the top countries in artificial intelligence by the total number of publications in 2021.“In the application development section, the main goal is to use artificial intelligence in priority areas such as health, transportation, and agriculture, and in the next priorities, areas such as education, industry, and environment have been considered.

In the development of enablers, we have considered the training of specialized manpower, the development of infrastructure, and the development of the innovation system,” he explained.

The AI roadmap document includes 10 major goals, 9 strategies, and 156 activities for which a ten-year horizon is envisaged, he said.

In order to develop the processing infrastructure, we have started equipping the ultra-fast processing center of the Center for Innovation and Development of Artificial Intelligence. We have also addressed the issues of regulation and standardization, which are very important, in addition to the implementation of service delivery platforms and infrastructures, data markets, and open data.

Moein expressed hope that in the framework of ethical issues while protecting the privacy of individuals, to implement the document with the participation of all related institutions and witness its positive impact on the country’s ecology and employment.

Iran’s progress in artificial intelligence

Iran is in 13th place among the top countries in artificial intelligence by the total number of publications in 2021, according to the Nature Index database.

The SCImago ranking database at the University of Granada, Spain, ranks countries and universities based on the number of scholarly articles from higher education institutions in the Scopus database. This ranking uses three indicators of research, innovation, and society in combination.

In the 2020 version of SCImago, the subject of artificial intelligence is a subcategory of computer science, which ranks Iran as 15th in the world and first in West Asia.

Also, in cognitive sciences as a subset of psychology, which is one of the disciplines related to artificial intelligence, Iran ranks 36th in the world and third in West Asia.

In electrical and electronic engineering, which has a part of artificial intelligence, Iran is ranked 15th in the world and first in West Asia.

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