Abstract: AI can be used for tremendous good, not least in medicine, as well as frivolous and dangerous uses, such as exploitative online pornography. However, it also has large scale structural impacts on the very nature of our world. The levels of financial investment in AI development and the financial and environmental costs of data centres, can seem obscene, especially as climate change and political instability is threatening to tear down the apparent stability of the late 20th century. AI has intensified some of the feedback effects of digital technology creating unprecedented emergent monopolies, that leave nations as well as individuals feeling all but powerless. These are huge issues, and ones that countries, including Malaysia, are struggling to cope with. However, there are also positive actions we can take as researchers and designers to ameliorate some of the problems and in the process create better and more resilient products that really serve people.

Date & Time: 15 January 2026 | 1600 (GMT+8)

Date & Time: 16 January 2026 | 1100 (GMT+8)

Marina Yusoff is currently a deputy director and senior fellow researcher at the Institute for Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (IBDAAI) and Associate Professor of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA Shah Alam, Malaysia. She has a Ph.D. in Information Technology and Quantitative Sciences (Intelligent Systems). She previously worked as a Senior Executive of Information Technology in SIRIM Berhad, Malaysia. She is most interested in multidisciplinary research, artificial intelligence, nature-inspired computing optimization, and data analytics. She applied and modified AI methods in many research and projects, including recent hybrid deep learning, particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, ant colony, and cuckoo search for many real-world problems, medical and industrial projects. Her recent projects are data analytic optimizer, audio, and image pattern recognition. She has many impact journal publications and contributes as an examiner and reviewer to many conferences, journals, and universities' academic activities.