China's Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology

[ashok321]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...il&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_term=.c94800693558

In this April 26, 2016 photo, a visitor takes a photo of a LeEco LeSEE self-driving electric concept car at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing. China’s government announced Thursday, July 21, 2017, a goal of transforming the country into a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade, putting additional political support behind growing investment by Chinese companies in developing self-driving cars and other advances. (Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press)


BEIJING — China’s government has announced a goal of becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade, putting political muscle behind growing investment by Chinese companies in developing self-driving cars and other advances.

Communist leaders see AI as key to making China an “economic power,” said a Cabinet statement on Thursday. It calls for developing skills and research and educational resources to achieve “major breakthroughs” by 2025 and make China a world leader by 2030.

Artificial intelligence is one of the emerging fields along with renewable energy, robotics and electric cars where communist leaders hope to take an early lead and help transform China from a nation of factory workers and farmers into a technology pioneer.

They have issued a series of development plans over the past decade, some of which have prompted complaints Beijing improperly subsidizes its technology developers and shields them from competition in violation of its free-trade commitments.

Already, Chinese companies including Tencent Ltd., Baidu Inc. and Alibaba Group are spending heavily to develop artificial intelligence for consumer finance, e-commerce, self-driving cars and other applications.


Manufacturers also are installing robots and other automation to cope with rising labor costs and improve efficiency.

Thursday’s statement gives no details of financial commitments or legal changes. But previous initiatives to develop Chinese capabilities in solar power and other technologies have included research grants and regulations to encourage sales and exports.

“By 2030, our country will reach a world leading level in artificial intelligence theory, technology and application and become a principal world center for artificial intelligence innovation,” the statement said.

That will help to make China “in the forefront of innovative countries and an economic power,” it said.

The announcement follows a sweeping plan issued in 2015, dubbed “Made in China 2025,” that calls for this country to supply its own high-tech components and materials in 10 industries from information technology and aerospace to pharmaceuticals.
That prompted complaints Beijing might block access to promising industries to support its fledgling suppliers. The Chinese industry minister defended the plan in March, saying all competitors would be treated equally. He rejected complaints that foreign companies might be required to hand over technology in exchange for market access.

China has had mixed success with previous strategic plans to develop technology industries including renewable energy and electric cars.


Beijing announced plans in 2009 to become a leader in electric cars with annual sales of 5 million by 2020. With the help of generous subsidies, China passed the United States last year as the biggest market, but sales totaled just over 300,000.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

 

[cirr]

iFlytek marries voice tech with artificial intelligence

2017-07-24 09:39

China Daily Editor: Liang Meichen

An employee of iFlytek demonstrates a voice-controlled speaker at an expo in Hefei, Anhui province. (Photo/Xinhua)

In November 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington "addressed" a conference in Beijing via a video link and highlighted the big leaps made by artificial intelligence or AI. As if to underscore his point, Obama switched to fluent Chinese and joked he wanted to contribute to China's development in his post-retirement years.

Well, turned out, it was not really Obama who made that speech. For the record: the former U.S. president hardly knows Chinese. The video clip was produced by iFlytek Co Ltd using AI, to demonstrate its speech synthesis capability, which can produce human voice.

The audience was wowed by the machine's ability to reproduce Obama's tone, intonations, inflections and pitch in Chinese words.

The video is part of iFlytek's broad efforts to tap into voice computing, which is said to be the next major medium for man-machine interaction.

The company was founded in 1999 by a group of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China. iFlytek is the Chinese counterpart of the U.S. firm Nuance Communications Inc and Siri, the virtual voice assistant developed by Apple Inc.

"We aim to offer key technologies needed for the era of voice interaction," Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek, said. The company is in fierce competition with Baidu Inc for supremacy in the burgeoning sector.

In Blizzard Challenge 2016, a global competition to test speech synthesis, iFlytek secured the crown in computer-based production of human-like voice in Chinese, English and Hindi languages. The score for Chinese synthesis reached 4.5 points, roughly meaning its computerized speech sounds like that of a TV news bulletin anchor.

Last year, the company also prevailed in the Winograd Schema Challenge, a well-recognized global competition to test machine intelligence.

The technology is widely used to enhance peoples' lives. As of April, about 300,000 startups are using the firm's voice computing platform to work on different applications ranging from smart house appliances, robots to conversation-savvy stuffed toys. Last year, there were half that number of firms using that technology, suggesting its adoption rate is increasing rapidly.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/07-24/266446.shtml

@Bussard Ramjet Is there an Indian equivalent of iFlytek?

 

[onebyone]

https://finance.yahoo.com/video/china-aims-build-leading-ai-011741631.html

China Aims to Build Leading AI Industry

Bloomberg Video•July 24, 2017
Jul.23 -- China is making a push in Artificial Intelligence aiming to make the AI industry an important driver of economic expansion by 2020. Bloomberg's Selina Wang reports on "Bloomberg Technology."

 

[Hrk19]

iFlytek marries voice tech with artificial intelligence

2017-07-24 09:39

China Daily Editor: Liang Meichen

An employee of iFlytek demonstrates a voice-controlled speaker at an expo in Hefei, Anhui province. (Photo/Xinhua)

In November 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington "addressed" a conference in Beijing via a video link and highlighted the big leaps made by artificial intelligence or AI. As if to underscore his point, Obama switched to fluent Chinese and joked he wanted to contribute to China's development in his post-retirement years.

Well, turned out, it was not really Obama who made that speech. For the record: the former U.S. president hardly knows Chinese. The video clip was produced by iFlytek Co Ltd using AI, to demonstrate its speech synthesis capability, which can produce human voice.

The audience was wowed by the machine's ability to reproduce Obama's tone, intonations, inflections and pitch in Chinese words.

The video is part of iFlytek's broad efforts to tap into voice computing, which is said to be the next major medium for man-machine interaction.

The company was founded in 1999 by a group of researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China. iFlytek is the Chinese counterpart of the U.S. firm Nuance Communications Inc and Siri, the virtual voice assistant developed by Apple Inc.

"We aim to offer key technologies needed for the era of voice interaction," Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek, said. The company is in fierce competition with Baidu Inc for supremacy in the burgeoning sector.

In Blizzard Challenge 2016, a global competition to test speech synthesis, iFlytek secured the crown in computer-based production of human-like voice in Chinese, English and Hindi languages. The score for Chinese synthesis reached 4.5 points, roughly meaning its computerized speech sounds like that of a TV news bulletin anchor.

Last year, the company also prevailed in the Winograd Schema Challenge, a well-recognized global competition to test machine intelligence.

The technology is widely used to enhance peoples' lives. As of April, about 300,000 startups are using the firm's voice computing platform to work on different applications ranging from smart house appliances, robots to conversation-savvy stuffed toys. Last year, there were half that number of firms using that technology, suggesting its adoption rate is increasing rapidly.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/07-24/266446.shtml

@Bussard Ramjet Is there an Indian equivalent of iFlytek?

man it would be great if they somehow made a personal app that let you hear other languages in different people's voices.
but thats probably not gonna happen soon

 

[cirr]

AI dream becoming reality

2017-07-28 10:18

Global Times Editor: Li Yan

Gov't aims to boost industry, but technology key to further development

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is under way in China, with its applications gradually entering more and more aspects of people's daily lives.

There are a wide variety of scenarios in which AI technologies can be applied in China: In hospitals, AI-driven models can help diagnose diseases by consolidating a database of information; in factories, robots equipped with visual tracking and sensor systems can help workers move components around on a conveyer belt, as well as identify different items and carry out pick-and-place work with precision. In banks, customers can ask questions to a humanoid robot about what kinds of services they need.

The sector is expected to grow even more rapidly in the next three to eight years, as the central government has shown its determination to help AI-related companies grow and make technological breakthroughs, according to industry representatives.

By 2020, the AI industry will become a new economic growth engine, according to a guideline unveiled by the State Council, China's cabinet, on Friday. The market scale will surpass 150 billion yuan ($22.2 billion), and advances are expected in major technologies including modeling, core components, high-end equipment and basic software, the guideline showed.

By 2030, China's AI technologies should be on par with the best in the world, and the country should become an innovative hub for AI technologies. The value of the sector and related industries should be in the range of 10 trillion yuan, said the guideline.

"The guideline will help the AI sector to grow in a sustainable way. However, it should clarify more which key technologies should be targeted and which sectors should further develop them," Lu Yanxia, an industry analyst with IDC, told the Global Times on Monday.

Top-level design for the AI industry will bring more capital as well as support from the government to the sector, which will initially help the application of AI technologies in government-related business to grow, Lu noted.

Eight key technologies have been highlighted in the AI industry guideline, including knowledge computing, reasoning, close interaction between machines and human beings, self-driving technologies, virtual reality and modeling, narrative language processing and machine learning.

Global hub

China is becoming a hub for global AI development, and the technology has now moved beyond the lab, with many machine-learning systems already in commercial use for a wide variety of applications, according to a report released by the McKinsey Global Institute in April.

"A robot, which is one of the containers of AI, should be considered as a species. Although a strong-AI or a super-AI are unlikely to suddenly happen, a robot can have the ability to think, step by step," Jiang Huabing, CEO of Shanghai Clever mRobot Technologies Co, told the Global Times on July 18.

The company, which has developed a service robot called Cooky, can carry out sentiment analysis by scanning a person's facial expression. When it is placed in a bank or an administrative office, Cooky can respond to people's requests based on scenario learning modules.

Jia, the former founder of the smartphone business at Huawei Technologies Co, has applied the business model favored by his former employer to the robotic start-up. By working with different software and hardware providers, mRobot is in charge of assembling different components and improving user experience.

However, it had to spend a large amount of money on buying core technologies such as voice recognition from other software developers iFLYTEK and Xiaoi.

Challenges remain

In the technological aspect of China's AI revolution, challenges still remain, Lu noted. "For example, speech recognition, as part of AI technology, is still in the early stages of development, and does not include semantic understanding or analysis."

However, in image processing, the environment where the technology is applied has very few obstacles, which "is still easy to handle," the analyst noted.

In a workshop at Shanghai-FANUC's factories, a robotic arm equipped with a visual tracking system is being tested.

"Although we can use image processing to carry out item-selection work, the question of machine learning is difficult to resolve," said Qian Hui, general manager of the company.

Machine learning is one type of AI technology that Shanghai-FANUC is focused on, but it is also receiving a great deal of attention by giant tech leaders such as Microsoft and Google.

The world was amazed by Google DeepMind's AI program, AlphaGo, which used machine learning to defeat its human rival in the board game Go. But the research giant has also come up with open-source software, which has become a machine-learning toolbox available for scientists, researchers and CEOs, media reported in June 2016.

Some tech companies have been increasingly investing in research and development with the aim of coming up with self-developed modules to better analyze collected data.

For instance, Chinese online car-services provider Didi Chuxing can optimize transportation capacity through data mining, machine learning and cloud computing in order to maximize the efficiency of transportation systems and improve people's travel experiences, according to a statement Didi sent to the Global Times on Tuesday.

Great expectations

The country's vast population and diverse industrial mix can generate huge volumes of data and create an enormous market, according to the McKinsey report.

While some companies are focusing on making technological breakthroughs, others see their opportunities in exploring a wide range of scenarios in which AI technologies can be applied in the near future.

"Now that the central government has shown its support for this industry, AI technologies can first be used in smart cities, financial institutions and services," said Lu, the analyst.

In terms of the application of AI technologies, the scenario for speech processing is considered the most mature one for now, but will see its growth slowing down, according to a report published by CCIC in June.

In addition, image processing technology can easily be used in many sectors, including security, hospitals, marketing and driver assistant systems, the report noted.

AI is not a fairy-tale anymore and requires the further development of AI and applications, iFLYTEK said in a statement sent to the Global Times on Monday, adding that its goal is to meet consumer demand.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/07-28/267117.shtml

 

[cirr]

Baidu reports soaring Q2 profit growth thanks to AI

2017-07-28 13:54

Xinhua Editor: Mo Hong'e

Chinese tech giant Baidu posted soaring profit growth in the second quarter of this year thanks to its continuous investment in artificial intelligence (AI).

Net income attributable to Baidu in Q2 reached 4.415 billion yuan (about 651 million U.S. dollars), jumping 82.9 percent year on year, according to the company's unaudited financial statement released Friday.

Total revenues stood at 20.874 billion yuan, a 14.3-percent increase from Q2 2016, with mobile revenue as the main contributor.

Online marketing revenues in Q2 reached 17.883 billion yuan, up 5.6 percent year on year.

Baidu announced its new mission in Q2 to "make a complex world simpler through technology."

To achieve the mission, Baidu will strengthen its mobile foundation in AI and use AI as a fundamental driver to elevate its current core business, specifically core products of Mobile Baidu, search and feed,according to Robin Li, Baidu's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.

Meanwhile, Baidu will continue to build out its newer AI-enabled initiatives through an open platform and ecosystem approach to capture long-term economic opportunity, Li added.

Baidu announced earlier this month it will roll out two major open AI platforms, DuerOS and Apollo, to speed up development in technology and applications for man-machine dialogue and autonomous driving.

The company expects to generate total revenues ranging from 23.130 billion yuan to 23.750 billion yuan for the third quarter of 2017, representing an annual increase of 26.7 percent to 30.1 percent.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/07-28/267155.shtml

 

[JSCh]

Chinese AI lab tops Stanford reading comprehension tasks
(People's Daily Online) 16:04, August 02, 2017

For the first time, a joint laboratory on artificial intelligence from the Chinese mainland has climbed to the top of the leaderboard of Stanford University’s reading comprehension task.

The joint laboratory of Harbin Institute of Technology and iFLYTEK Research now sits on top of Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) leaderboard, followed by Microsoft Research Asia in second place and IBM Research in tenth place. Other Chinese institutes are also on the board, including Eigen Technology and Zhejiang University and Tsinghua University.

(Snapshot of SQuAD website)​

SQuAD is a new reading comprehension dataset, consisting of questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to every question is a segment of text, or span, from the corresponding reading passage.

With over 100,000 question-answer pairs on some 500 articles, SQuAD is significantly larger than previous reading comprehension datasets, according to its website.

The Chinese joint laboratory scored an accuracy rate of 77.845 on exact matching, while runner-up Microsoft got 77.688 percent correct.

“It is relatively easy for machines to conduct simple deduction based on massive memorization. But it is harder to comprehend and deduct in a precise way. Almost all AI research teams are working on similar things,” Wang Shijin, deputy director of the champion joint laboratory, told Thepaper.cn.

Since May 2015, the joint laboratory preformed machine reading comprehension tasks. Specifically, the lab aims to make the machine read at the sixth-grade level, while one of iFLYTEK’s grander goals is to understand China's college entrance examination, as it hopes to make machine scores high enough for top universities.

In June, a Chengdu-designed artificial intelligence program called AI-MATHS scored 100 out of 150 on the national test paper on math in just 10 minutes.

 

[52051]

This is just show, the dominating position China hold in AI research, just most bleeding edge area research in the world:

Recently, Standford University in US hold a world competition in solving one of the toughest problem in AI: SQuAD（Stanford Question Answering Dataset), a.k.a natural language understanding test world cup.

Teams from all over the world, including China and US (including Microsoft, Google, Facebook, IBM, Standford, CMU etc) enter the competition.

https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

Among Top 10 position, teams from China taken 7, and the two Microsoft teams reach top10 are also lead by Chinese academican from Micosoft research China.

Team from Haerbin insistute of Tech and KDXF, a spin-off of China University of Science and Technology won the competition.

The test consists of let the AI read some English text to gain the knowledge then use such knowledge to answer about 10,000 questions.

So basically China dominated the US in their home turf (test sets are designed by US and in English), and 9 of the Top 10 are from China, the only one outside of China reached Top10 is CMU from the USA, and it standing is just No.10.

which give the outsider an idea how much the tech gap between China and US are there.

 

[52051]

Natural language processing, natural language understanding in particular, is the so-called AI-hard problem in CS, and the one of the hardest problems encountered in AI research, and it has enoumous potential economic potential once solved since it is the bridge between machine's raw computing power and pure knowledge.

Once solved, such tech can let the machine to learn knowledge themselves from outside world at a speed only limited by electrity, basically it is the fundemental problem and most critical tech to achieve the kind of AI bots you saw in sci-fi movies.

So its highly likely the first working skynet is likely be deployed in China, althrough the not-working one like you saw in terminator may independendly or dependendly developed in the US 20 or 30 years later.

Accroding to the list:
https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

So far the only team besides China and US reach top is from NUS of Singapore, another Chinese-dominated country, and its position is 14th.

 

[Kal Muah]

China's own AI may be the next thing thats going to bring revolution.
China chatbot goes rogue: ‘Do you love the Communist party?’ ‘No’
and subsequently silenced like every criticism. What an Irony....
Rogue chatbots deleted in China after questioning Communist Party

 

[Offshore]

China's own AI may be the next thing thats going to bring revolution.
China chatbot goes rogue: ‘Do you love the Communist party?’ ‘No’
and subsequently silenced like every criticism. What an Irony....
Rogue chatbots deleted in China after questioning Communist Party

I wonder how is indian position in AI field?
Is there any university in indian have AI research?
I heard indian talked a lot about IIT university ( correct me if I'm wrong ) which dubbed as the best university in india, are these university have AI research?

 

[Kal Muah]

I wonder how is indian position in AI field?
Is there any university in indian have AI research?
I heard indian talked a lot about IIT university ( correct me if I'm wrong ) which dubbed as the best university in india, are these university have AI research?

No but I wonder could you tell me what happened with the chatbots? Did they got censored like the winnie the pooh?

 

[shadows888]

No but I wonder could you tell me what happened with the chatbots? Did they got censored like the winnie the pooh?

and the only thing you can do is weep.

 

[AndrewJin]

I wonder how is indian position in AI field?
Is there any university in indian have AI research?
I heard indian talked a lot about IIT university ( correct me if I'm wrong ) which dubbed as the best university in india, are these university have AI research?

Indians are intelletually and physically weak, just check their PISA test.

They have zero future in this ongoing industrial revolution.

 

[rustom]

Indians are intelletually and physically weak, just check their PISA test.

They have zero future in this ongoing industrial revolution.

Says a stupid dumbshit commie 50 center