Technology Leaders Program performs consulting services and studies and offers innovative solutions to government and private bodies to promote the role of science and technology in the Kingdom’s sustainable development.
Our consulting services focus on our stakeholders’ most critical issues and opportunities across all industries and geographies. We bring deep, functional expertise, but are known for our holistic perspective. TLP develops unique solutions to address our stakeholders’ complex challenges and create value through sustainable innovation and technology-enabled business transformation services. We help our clients in designing and achieving their roadmaps by combining creative thinking, technology expertise, and global reach. Further, we provide deeper insights into the clients’ problems and develop innovative responses to their most pressing challenges, leading with an empathetic, human-centered perspective. We transcend the limitations of traditional software tools by combining new technologies, approaches, and methodologies which helps in accelerating our response to new realities using data analytics and artificial intelligence. Our global partnerships with the world’s best universities in the most strategic science and technology areas for the Kingdom enables us to provide a unique consulting services for technology transfer and development.
Our Capabilities.
Advances in collecting, processing, disseminating, and preserving information have resulted in the proliferation of data from a wide variety of sources in Saudi Arabia. Open data is a growing global movement that encourages governments to facilitate access to as many of their data sets as possible, making it freely available and machine-readable, in order to promote and facilitate increased civic engagement and economic growth. The following is a proposal for the design and development of a Saudi Open Government Data (OGD) portal, “Saudi Bayanat Portal” to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration in the publication and use of government data in Saudi Arabia.
The “Saudi Bayanat Portal” is a platform that uses information from government agencies to inform decision-making among executives, policymakers and citizens. Unlike existing open data sites in the Saudi public sector, the “Saudi Bayanat Portal” platform will facilitate access to machine readable data and allow users to understand and visualize the critical issues facing Saudi Arabia in areas such as education, transportation, healthcare, and labor across sectors and regions within the Kingdom. While open data websites can deliver statistics from Saudi government sectors, actually gleaning insights from that data can be a different challenge entirely. Through advanced data analytics and visualization, the proposed “Bayanat Portal” platform allows all users to browse and filter information and then create visualizations to enhance their understanding of national, regional and local issues in Saudi Arabia.
Government data exists across diverse categories, including but not limited to information published by agencies for statistical purposes, information in administrative records on individuals and businesses, and physical measurements about natural phenomena. With Saudi Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia has unveiled an ambitious plan to build a sustainable and prosperous economy with a reduced dependence on oil. To help meet these goals, the country has launched a number of initiatives that called for government entities to take steps to promote transparency, participation, and collaboration in the publication and use of government data, aligned with global Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives. As part of GaStat strategic plan to improve the quality of services, products and work of GaStat, GaStat decided to collaborate with the Center for Complex Engineering Systemd (CCES) at KACST and MIT, and start the work on a portal that serve as the gate to statistical information in the kingdom (The Saudi Bayanat Portal).
Vision 2030, the ambitious plan to building a sustainable and prosperous economy, announced that the main national income must no longer depend on oil, and promised to develop a healthier more productive capital. Land is amongst the most valuable assets to a country, and Saudi Arabia is gifted with a total area ranking at the top 15 worldwide. Despite the available land, the country is sparsely developed and populated, and the housing market is not meeting the demand of its citizens. The decision makers have realized that providing affordable housing, as such, to its fast-growing population is a critical factor to the success of this vision, with the Ministry of Housing (MOH) being a key player in achieving this vision.
The idle land fees regulation act, announced last year, was one of the most anticipated and long-awaited regulations in the history of Saudi Arabia. The goal of the act is to encourage landowners to develop housing solutions to ease the housing shortage (estimated at 1.5 million affordable homes) in the market and reduce the artificial inflation of land prices. The new act is going to impose a 2.5% annual fee of the land’s value MOH is the responsible entity of executing and governing the new regulation. Therefore, MOH must decide the value of each idle land before it can impose the new fees.
Center for Complex Engineering Systems at KACST and MIT (CCES) has provided MOH with a scientific method to valuate the prices of idle lands in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dammam, Makkah, and Madinah. While conducting the study, CCES team used a mixture of statistical modeling, machine learning algorithms, and big data analysis techniques for gaging the value of idle lands. In addition, CCES has developed a web-based tool, called Moqayem, that provides reports and summary information about idle land in the five cities; and it also provides an intuitive system to assist MOH in calculating the value of an idle land.
As part of the Kingdom’s plan to build a sustainable and a prosperous economy outlined in Vision 2030, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced that the country’s income must no longer depend extensively on oil. Instead, the plan promised to diversify the nation’s economy and limit the extensive subsidies that are currently in place. The Citizen’s Account (CA) program has been introduced to provide financial support to citizens that are economically vulnerable to the increase of the cost of subsidized services. The Ministry of Economy and Planning (MEP), the Ministry of Finance (MOF), and the Ministry of Labor and Social Development (MLSD) have been leading the effort to design a program that will help achieve this vision.
MEP with the help of MLSD and MOF have designed the rules of the program by exploring a set of possible scenarios, where each set produces different outcomes for cost and coverage. Center for Complex Engineering Systems at KACST and MIT (CCES) has worked with the aforementioned ministries to evaluate the main levers for the scenarios that were simulated. To be able to simulate all possible scenarios, CCES team has developed a simulation engine that is capable of executing all possible combinations of options for each lever.
In addition, for evaluation purposes, key performance indicators (KPIs) that are used to identify the most suitable scenario were defined. An optimization engine was also developed to explore new scenarios and select an optimum one that meets a certain objective such as minimizing cost, maximizing coverage, and/or improving equality. Finally, a visualization platform was developed, which encapsulates the components of the study (such as statistical analysis, scenario evaluation, and optimization) allowing stakeholders to explore the results of our analysis and test new scenarios with different parameters.
