Imagination for Technological Development

Altinbas University's Faculty of Architecture and Engineering held the Republic's 100th Year Conference at the Mahmutbey campus.

 

In his opening speech at the conference, Altinbas University Vice Rector Prof. Dr. Ali Argun Karacabey stated that understanding technological changes and tracking their impacts on our lives has become a challenging endeavor. Prof. Dr. Karacabey said, "As a social scientist, we should thank all engineers worldwide for their contributions to this development. The ability of engineers to design and change the future has become more critical than ever in world history."

 

Referring to Einstein's quote, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," Prof. Dr. Karacabey emphasized that designing and changing the future begins with imagination. In this context, he mentioned the engineer John Elfreth Watkins from the 19th century, who, in an article published in Ladies Home Journal in 1900, described how the world would be 100 years later. Watkins predicted the ability to send photographs over long distances via telegraph, a concept that sounds familiar today.

 

Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Prof. Dr. Galip Cansever, addressed the fourth industrial revolution as the final destination in the history of societies' economic production models. Cansever emphasized that digitalization of industries will form the basis for future smart production processes. He explained that in just 4-5 years, approximately 50 billion devices in industrial units worldwide will communicate with each other over the internet.

 

Prof. Dr. Cansever stated, "Smart city, home, logistics, network, and device-based smart production systems will merge with social networks and e-commerce networks. The ecosystem created by services, objects, and individuals using the internet will affect about 50% of the global trade volume in the next 25 years." He also mentioned that the rapidly increasing digitalization in industry will require approximately 3 million robots, capable of easily communicating with each other and a central system.

 

Providing recommendations for businesses aiming to lead in global competition, Prof. Dr. Cansever said, "Companies' organizational structures need to be adapted to these processes. While the human factor remains crucial, teams must develop their skills. Teams should consist of designers, programmers, and implementers who work with team spirit, especially as the use of intelligent robots in production and distribution processes increases, and artificial intelligence systems are used in R&D, sales, marketing, and management processes."

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) studies, rooted in the desire to create thinking machines, are subject to debates, particularly in ethical aspects. Altinbas University Faculty of Applied Sciences Management Information Systems Assistant Professor Incilay Yildiz also provided insights into this field.

 

Dr. Incilay Yildiz likened the artificial learning process to human learning and drew attention to the similarities between biological nerve cells and artificial neural networks. Yildiz defined artificial intelligence as the simulation of thinking and learning in machines programmed for human-like cognition. She explained, "Artificial intelligence is designed to perform tasks that require human intelligence. Examples include machines or algorithms with visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation capabilities." Yildiz continued her speech with examples to better understand these concepts in daily life.

 

"Machines learning studies are used in areas such as prediction, classification, data association, data interpretation, and data filtering. For prediction, we can give an example of predicting the future price of a product. For classification, determining customer segmentations can be mentioned. Data association involves completing an incomplete picture, data interpretation includes handwriting or signature recognition, and data filtering aims to select appropriate inputs for dimension reduction and feature selection processes to achieve the best results," explained Dr. Incilay Yildiz.

 

Dr. Incilay Yildiz concluded her remarks by highlighting the advancements in Generative AI, which, along with deep learning, enables computer systems to process different data types such as text, images, and sound, creating original content in productive artificial intelligence. She pointed to technologies like GPT-4 and DALL-E as examples of these developments.​