Nurturing Ethical AI Talent Through Industry-Academia Alliances
C.B.Desk: The AI Collective Bangladesh Chapter, part of a US-based global non-profit community platform, recently organized an industry-academia dialogue on AI education jointly with The Daily Ittefaq, to address the scope of collaboration between industry and academia to bridge the AI education gap to develop technically-equipped workforce, adhering high ethical and moral values.
The program, titled “Ethical AI Readiness: Shaping Tomorrow’s Workforce,” was held at the Majida Begum Auditorium, The Daily Ittefaq office, where senior and prominent academicians from renowned universities and CXO’s from leading tech companies participated.
The session commenced with an overview about The AI Collective and their mission and purpose presented by the Bangladesh Chapter Convenor, Mohammed Asif. He emphasized on Bangladesh chapter’s role in fostering a community that prioritizes ethical principles in development and usage of AI, stating “Industry-Academia strong bonding to bridge AI education gap, particularly preparing a workforce that will not only be technically skilled but also act ethically in developing and adopting AI systems.”
In his keynote speech Kh. Ehsanur Rahman, Vice President (Data Science and AI), Prime Now, emphasized that AI adoption is becoming inevitable for Bangladesh, reshaping productivity, governance, and industry competitiveness. Citing global and national AI diffusion trends, he highlighted the urgency of building a skilled and ethical workforce capable of responsibly applying AI across key sectors. He stressed that hands-on capability, ethical principles, and stronger academia–industry collaboration are essential to prepare students for real world AI deployment.
The roundtable session, moderated by Sami Al Islam, a Sr. IT Professional was vibrant with many thoughtful opinions by experts’ educationist discussants. They opined teachers’ readiness is core in teaching student’s frontier, updated technologies with real-life innovation and use cases, particularly focusing on IR 5.0 and human-centric innovation. Setting-up a National AI Learning Hub equipped with high-powered GPU-based Data Center is required immediately that is accessible to all including remote and rural areas with lab facilities to conduct Bootcamps and workshops to develop open-sourced dataset for AI-Systems.
Educators raised the growing concern that students are frequently using AI tools like ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini in their assignments, thesis, and research that significantly impact the progress of their natural merit-level. Apart from traditional computer science engineering and software engineering, students from other educational backgrounds could be taught AI if data science, statistics, mathematics and most importantly analytical and critical thinking capabilities develop among them. Academics are also highly emphasized in developing a framework in collaboration with industry, academia and regulatory bodies, focused curriculum modification, and updating where LLM, NLP, deep-learning facilities will be available. Setting up AI Innovation Center and AI Incubation centers in all Universities and education institutes are becoming an immediate necessity to foster AI research and development.
On the other hand, Tech-Industry experts highlighted, we are far behind in AI-system development due to significant shortage of skills as academia’s constantly left behind in preparing industry-ready tech talents. Telecommunication, especially mobile phone operators are slightly ahead using AI-systems whereby they are applying business analytics for forecasting, real-time usages update, network status prediction, churn management etc. They raise concern of falling behind the AI-race like previous tech-revolutions where industry standards like ISO, CMMI level have not been established to measure standard of technology-based solutions development and its progress. Current ICT policy, data protection, and cyber-security law may not be relevant in all aspects and some of those laws, policies require modification, update as AI-based innovations are rapidly evolving.
Use of AI in the finance and banking segment needs a clear and comprehensive road map for adopting AI for ensuring responsible governance in project management, risk management and sustainable innovation. After the long discussion, it was clearly understood that all of the speakers echoed similar concerns or improvements. The keywords of concern and improvement were mostly changing mindset, industry-academia-regulatory authority joint efforts, industry-academia close collaboration, solving local problems through AI, establishment of AI innovation hubs, industrial internship from the beginning of education, and having intellectual agility.
Tasmima Hossain, Editor of The Daily Ittefaq, chaired as special guest, has emphasized on creating awareness among mass-people, especially targeting women and children who are adversely impacted by fake, fragmented, fabricated, misleading information on social media. Highlighting the important role of media, she suggested spreading the messages of good and bad contents (generated by AI) among people through small, crisp, easily understandable tips.
