Qatari entrepreneur participates as guest speaker in Int’l consumer tech conference

Khalid Aboujassoum, one of the most successful Qatari entrepreneurs and innovators, appeared as a guest speaker at the CES Food Tech Conference, an annual trade show organised by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).
Held at the Venetian Expo and Convention Center in Las Vegas, the largest-of-its-kind international event typically hosts presentations of products and technologies in the consumer electronics industry.
The latest edition of the conference examined how the world of food and cooking is being reinvented through innovation and technology. It brought together leaders of food, culinary, and technology industries from around the world to share lessons learned and discuss the biggest opportunities and challenges in food tech.
CTA, the conference’s organiser, is a standards and trade organisation representing more than 2,200 consumer technology companies in the US.
Its flagship conference serves as the ultimate platform for business magnates and pioneering thinkers to connect, collaborate and propel consumer technology forward. Among the key participants are manufacturers, developers, and suppliers of consumer technology hardware, content, technology delivery systems, and more.
Aboujassoum is the founder and CEO of Else Labs Inc., which produces and sells his own revolutionary invention Oliver, a smart cooking robot that helps optimise kitchen automation.
He is also the co-founder and current chairman of Ibtechar, Qatar’s first incubated innovation and turnkey solutions start-up, which has delivered 70 percent of all innovation spaces in Qatar over the past decade.
Named Qatar’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2011, Aboujassoum was the first Qatari winner of the Stars of Science award in 2012. He holds Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering, Engineering Management, and Entrepreneurship from the University of Ottawa, Canada.
On day 2 of the CES Food Tech Conference, Aboujassoum participated as a panellist in a session titled ‘The Kitchen 2030: How Food and Cooking Will Change in the Future’. The discussions focused on the significant transformation that artificial intelligence (AI), smart technologies, and robotics are expected to bring to the way people cook, store, and even eat food over the next decade.
“It is inevitable that robots will cook our food,” said Aboujassoum in his speech. “The questions are when and who is going to make it happen?”
“Our design thesis is that form should follow function, and Oliver is a manifestation of that. I do not believe that cooking robots will have dangling hands to perform the tasks. The cooking robots of the future will be familiar and designed with purpose, and Oliver is exactly that. Technology is driving convergence in the process,” he added.

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