The future ", as the mayor of Ourense, Gonzalo Pérez Jácome, defined on more than one occasion, his promised Artificial Intelligence Center, a project that the top experts in Spain in AI - a field with few initiatives and a lack of professionals - do not know. While the councilor dreams of AI, he supports the disappearance of the Aula Cemit for digital literacy that is used by thousands of people from Ourense in La Molinera, now the center's headquarters. Jácome despises the need for part of the population to start in technological skills as an activity to that "there are four" and is "a cyber", while its Center for Artificial Intelligence has only offered citizens six talks on YouTube.
The best appointment that Jácome found last October to inaugurate the Artificial Intelligence Center was the following: "As long as the pigsty exists, the pigs appear alone." The "pigsty" promised as a revolution for Ourense maintains the eight people initially hired - under the figure of political advisers to Jácome -, despite the fact that the councilor announced "another 30 more engineers" before 2021. Nothing is known. He even raised the idea to "1,000 scientists" in the first steps of this pretentious initiative that adds to the mayor's list of occurrences.
It is not realistic "
"We have a shortage of people capable of programming algorithms. People who know how to do it earn a lot of money and it is a limited number of people. The community is small and we all know each other. The conditions offered by the market to professionals with this capacity cannot be afforded. the public administration ", says Lorena Jaume-Palasí, one of the greatest experts in Artificial Intelligence in Spain. She is part of the committee of wise men that the Government appointed for its AI and Big Data strategy. "34,000 euros a year? It is extremely low," he points out in reference to the salary charged by the engineers that Jácome hired "by hand", as he himself has acknowledged, despite suggesting that they send resumes and not answering the candidates who they offered themselves to positions that already had an owner because they came from one-man decisions. "Singular" case in the methods of choosing centers of this type.
This is not doing a master's degree "
"It is not realistic. It is not realistic either to create a center of 1,000 scientists. I do not know where it will get them from, it does not have the money or the incentives that it would have to offer," adds Jaume-Palasí. Along the same lines, Jesús López Fidalgo, director of the Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Navarra, is surprised by Jácome's figures: "We are 60. One hundred is already a lot of people, there is no project like this in Spain".
The Citius, a pioneer in Galicia
Fidalgo also insists on the lack of training. "This is not doing a master's degree. One of the problems we have is that we lack qualified personnel to be part of this type of institute."
The scientific director of the only center specialized in AI in Galicia, Senén Barros, does not get wet about the existence of the Ourense project. He does give clues to the effort involved in the birth of such a center. "CiTIUS was born linked to Campus Vida, recognized by the State for more than a decade. They are centers that have a governance and functional model similar to those of the best research centers in the world. They did not start from scratch." CiTIUS funding comes from national and international research projects, but also from the Xunta, an autonomous government that precisely disassociates itself from the center of Jácome.
"You have to reach companies"
Valencian Inma Martínez has been advising the Government of the United Kingdom and the European Parliament on Artificial Intelligence for a decade. She is also on the Government AI council. She did not know about the project. "The Ourense center should focus on companies and their needs. In Spain there are many collaboration projects between departments and universities and they have achieved a lot of international support, but what we need is to get these skills to companies," she says.
Asunción Gómez, who was also unaware of the Ourense project, is another recognized Spanish expert on the matter. Professor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, she emphasizes: "Lack of training."
Professionals agree that the method of hiring staff at centers of this type is never a "one-man" decision, as is the case with the Jácome Artificial Intelligence Center. On the other hand, the users of the Aula Cemit claim their digital literacy services that Jácome sees as "expendable".
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