China's Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
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cirr
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AI increasingly used to tackle crime in China
2017-09-30 09:26
Xinhua Editor: Gu Liping
Finding a lost child in a city of 10 million people could take the human eye forever, but AI technology can do things in just two seconds.
During Spring Festival this year, 3-year-old Xuanxuan was abducted by a stranger in the city of Shenzhen in south China. Without the help of AI, Xuanxuan may never have seen his parents again.
A local police station equipped with AI system used facial recognition technology to recognize the suspect after a two-second search of live video captured on thousands of security cameras.Police officers quickly identified the suspect, captured her on a train and retrieved the lost boy.
Recognizing images each containing millions of pixels used to be mission impossible for machines. But with the advancement of AI, scientists have developed systems capable of learning. Fed enough data these systems can learn to identify images such as faces and vehicles. The more they learn, the smarter they become.
Peng Ran, chief marketing officer of IntelliFusion, a company behind the technology which aided Xuanxuan's rescue, said the impact of AI on public security was game-changing.
"The error rate of AI-powered facial recognition has been narrowed to a level lower than humans," Peng said. "It works with astonishing precision and efficiency, plus it never gets tired."
AI has made Shenzhen safer. In Longgang, Shenzhen's first district to embrace AI in public security, the crime rate is plummeting. In the first half of 2017, theft and robbery cases in the district dropped by more than half, and AI helped solve 67 percent of such crimes.
Wang Li, a 21-year-old hotel waitress in Shenzhen, usually asks her boyfriend to escort her when she goes home late at night. But she said she does not do it out of safety concerns but to test her lover's devotion.
"The city is perfectly safe," Wang said. "I've never been robbed, let alone assaulted."
Behind Shenzhen's success in bringing down crime is China's rapid advancement in AI technology. The State Council issued guidelines on developing AI in July, aiming to make AI a key economic driving force by 2020, and become a global AI innovation center by 2030.
In a recent report, investment bank Goldman Sachs said China had emerged as a major global contender in using AI to drive economic progress, and was fast catching up with the United States in AI.
Consulting Group iResearch predicts China's AI market will reach 9.1 billion U.S. dollars by 2020, with an annual growth rate of 50 percent.
Attracted by the lucrative market, tech companies are diving head first into the battlefield. At the 2017 China Intelligent Equipment and Robot Expo held September 22-24 in Guangzhou, exhibitors showcased AI products designed for security purposes,including smart locks, patrol robots and robot firefighters.
Gosuncn, an AI company based in Guangzhou, exhibited robots designed to defuse bombs, prevent fire, control crowds and spot crime.
Zhou Ke, marketing manager of the company, said their robots were well received by security companies, shopping malls and warehouses, because they could relieve humans from tedious and dangerous tasks.
"They are reliable, tireless and very smart," Zhou said.
AI may be smart, but plenty of people believe humans ultimately outsmart machines.Technology geeks claim that AI security measures can be fooled, and say they can bypass facial recognition with photos to access bank accounts.
Peng agrees that AI can be tricked, but not with people standing behind it. To counter criminal tricks, such as covering their faces, IntelliFusion is training its system to recognize clothes, body shape and even posture.
The company's AI system is also learning how people's faces change with age. Given enough training, it will be able to recognize people's faces based on their childhood pictures. Peng hopes this technology will help parents who lost their children many years ago.
Peng believes it could be ultimate solution to fighting human trafficking - a thorny problem that worries millions of parents across the nation.
"With the help of AI, no child will be lost in the future," Peng said.
http://www.ecns.cn/2017/09-30/275811.shtml
2017-09-30 09:26
Xinhua Editor: Gu Liping
Finding a lost child in a city of 10 million people could take the human eye forever, but AI technology can do things in just two seconds.
During Spring Festival this year, 3-year-old Xuanxuan was abducted by a stranger in the city of Shenzhen in south China. Without the help of AI, Xuanxuan may never have seen his parents again.
A local police station equipped with AI system used facial recognition technology to recognize the suspect after a two-second search of live video captured on thousands of security cameras.Police officers quickly identified the suspect, captured her on a train and retrieved the lost boy.
Recognizing images each containing millions of pixels used to be mission impossible for machines. But with the advancement of AI, scientists have developed systems capable of learning. Fed enough data these systems can learn to identify images such as faces and vehicles. The more they learn, the smarter they become.
Peng Ran, chief marketing officer of IntelliFusion, a company behind the technology which aided Xuanxuan's rescue, said the impact of AI on public security was game-changing.
"The error rate of AI-powered facial recognition has been narrowed to a level lower than humans," Peng said. "It works with astonishing precision and efficiency, plus it never gets tired."
AI has made Shenzhen safer. In Longgang, Shenzhen's first district to embrace AI in public security, the crime rate is plummeting. In the first half of 2017, theft and robbery cases in the district dropped by more than half, and AI helped solve 67 percent of such crimes.
Wang Li, a 21-year-old hotel waitress in Shenzhen, usually asks her boyfriend to escort her when she goes home late at night. But she said she does not do it out of safety concerns but to test her lover's devotion.
"The city is perfectly safe," Wang said. "I've never been robbed, let alone assaulted."
Behind Shenzhen's success in bringing down crime is China's rapid advancement in AI technology. The State Council issued guidelines on developing AI in July, aiming to make AI a key economic driving force by 2020, and become a global AI innovation center by 2030.
In a recent report, investment bank Goldman Sachs said China had emerged as a major global contender in using AI to drive economic progress, and was fast catching up with the United States in AI.
Consulting Group iResearch predicts China's AI market will reach 9.1 billion U.S. dollars by 2020, with an annual growth rate of 50 percent.
Attracted by the lucrative market, tech companies are diving head first into the battlefield. At the 2017 China Intelligent Equipment and Robot Expo held September 22-24 in Guangzhou, exhibitors showcased AI products designed for security purposes,including smart locks, patrol robots and robot firefighters.
Gosuncn, an AI company based in Guangzhou, exhibited robots designed to defuse bombs, prevent fire, control crowds and spot crime.
Zhou Ke, marketing manager of the company, said their robots were well received by security companies, shopping malls and warehouses, because they could relieve humans from tedious and dangerous tasks.
"They are reliable, tireless and very smart," Zhou said.
AI may be smart, but plenty of people believe humans ultimately outsmart machines.Technology geeks claim that AI security measures can be fooled, and say they can bypass facial recognition with photos to access bank accounts.
Peng agrees that AI can be tricked, but not with people standing behind it. To counter criminal tricks, such as covering their faces, IntelliFusion is training its system to recognize clothes, body shape and even posture.
The company's AI system is also learning how people's faces change with age. Given enough training, it will be able to recognize people's faces based on their childhood pictures. Peng hopes this technology will help parents who lost their children many years ago.
Peng believes it could be ultimate solution to fighting human trafficking - a thorny problem that worries millions of parents across the nation.
"With the help of AI, no child will be lost in the future," Peng said.
http://www.ecns.cn/2017/09-30/275811.shtml
Keel
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Tech #BigData
JUL 31, 2017 @ 09:00 AM
China's Rise In The Global AI Race Emerges As It Takes Over The Final ImageNet Competition
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2017/07/31/china-ai-imagenet/#49dcfe17170a
Aaron Tilley , FORBES STAFF
The Chinese Government recently said it would invest heavily in artificial intelligence to ensure its companies, government and military dominate the field by 2030. Now there's growing evidence that China may not have that far to go to claim the AI crown.
Perhaps there's no better place to note China's rise in AI than with this year's ImageNet competition, an influential AI contest where teams from across the world compete over which algorithms can best recognize images.
Out of the 27 teams competing, more than half were Chinese-based research teams from universities or companies, and all the top performers were from China. The results were something of a repeat from last year, when Chinese scientists also dominated a field of 84 teams from around the world. To be sure, leading AI players like Google, who won top results in 2014, haven't participated in the last couple ImageNets. But China's dominance in the last two years of the competition shows just how much serious AI work is coming out of the country these days.
In this year's competitions, top results for the closely-monitored image classification challenge had an error rate of only 2.25% from a team called WMW, a small jump from the previous year's 2.99% error rate. WMW's team included two researchers from Beijing-based autonomous vehicle startup Momenta -- Jie Hu and Gang Sun -- as well as Li Shen from the University of Oxford. In an email to Forbes, the Chinese researchers said they use a technique called "squeeze and excitation," which both enhances useless feature and suppresses less useful ones of a convolutional neural network.
A big jump over the previous year happened in object detection, which refers to a computer's ability to recognize objects and identify them in an image -- there are three apples in the picture and one cat, for example. The winning team, called DBAT, achieved an accuracy of 73.1% over last year's 66.3%. The DBAT team consisted of a collection of eight researchers from China's Nanjing University and two from Imperial College London.
Since starting in 2010, ImageNet (or Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge) has emerged as an influential event in the AI research community to track the latest advances in image recognition systems. The year 2012, in particular, is regarded as a watershed moment for AI and deep learning when a team from the University of Toronto made a major breakthrough in image recognition accuracy. Led by Alex Krizhevsky, the PhD student used a deep neural network to train a model and achieved image classification error rate of 15% -- a giant leap from the previous year's rate of around 25%. His model, called AlexNet, demonstrated the viability of deep learning systems, which had been around since at least the 1950s, but until then hadn't been taken very seriously. (Krizhevsky and his advisor, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, both now work at Google's AI lab.)
“2012 was really the year when there was a massive breakthrough in accuracy, but it was also a proof of concept for deep learning models, which had been around for decades,” said Olga Russakovsky, a computer science processor at Princeton University and an ImageNet organizer. “It really was the first time these models had been shown to work in context of large-scale image recognition problems.”
Deep learning techniques have since taken off like wild fire in the AI community as well as at nearly every tech company. These AI systems very loosely resemble how the brain functions -- many neurons networked together with synapses. The systems are trained on massive sets of data and are able to pick out patterns in the data.
Following the 2012 contest, large tech companies like Google and Microsoft began taking part in ImageNet to show off their latest advances in deep learning-based image recognition systems. In 2014, Google entered the competition with a team called GoogLeNet, and made a big breakthrough in object detection accuracy: 43.9% from the previous year's 22.6% accuracy. ImageNet makes for good marketing: In 2013, AI researcher Matt Zeiler launched his AI startup, Clarifai, while achieving top results at ImageNet in image classification -- a jump to 12% error rate from Krizhevsky's 15% the year before.
ImageNet's organizers wanted to stop running the classification challenge in 2014 and focus more on object localization and detection as well as video later on, but the tech industry continued to track classification closely throughout the years.
Now, ImageNet is shutting down because of performance saturation in challenges like image classification, said Alex Berg, a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an ImageNet organizer. "There's not a lot of room on the top," he said.
"I think ImageNet is still making massive progress," added Russakovsky. "But it's healthy for the community to start focusing on perhaps other tasks, challenges or datasets."
Some in the AI community are wondering what research-focused AI challenges might take ImageNet's place. One possible contender Russakovsky points to is the COCO (or Common Objects in Context) contest. Berg is also working on putting together a challenge for image recognition based strictly on real world data using smartphone cameras. One contest, called WebVision, requires teams to train their models on images culled from the internet that haven't been exhaustively labeled, like ImageNet's dataset.
The results for the WebVision challenge were recently announced and the top performer was Shenzhen-based Malong Technologies, maker of AI developer tools for image recognition tasks. Malong achieved a 94.78% accuracy rate in classifying the web images. Malong is a private business, but it opened a joint AI research lab with Tsinghua University with official sponsorship from the Shenzhen government, which is making offers of $1 million to any AI efforts kickstarted there.
"AI is so fierce now, you need any competitive advantage you can get," said Matt Scott, cofounder and chief technology officer at Malong. "Government support is one of the very helpful things going on in China."
Click here for details on how to send me information anonymously. Follow me on Twitter @aatilley or send me an email: atilley@forbes.com
You can also find additional details of ImageNet @#197 courtesy of @JSCh and also another AI competition in below website and @#200 and 215 posted separately by @JSCh and @qwerty earlier on this thread:
SQuAD
The Stanford Question Answering Dataset
https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/
JUL 31, 2017 @ 09:00 AM
China's Rise In The Global AI Race Emerges As It Takes Over The Final ImageNet Competition
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2017/07/31/china-ai-imagenet/#49dcfe17170a
Aaron Tilley , FORBES STAFF
The Chinese Government recently said it would invest heavily in artificial intelligence to ensure its companies, government and military dominate the field by 2030. Now there's growing evidence that China may not have that far to go to claim the AI crown.
Perhaps there's no better place to note China's rise in AI than with this year's ImageNet competition, an influential AI contest where teams from across the world compete over which algorithms can best recognize images.
Out of the 27 teams competing, more than half were Chinese-based research teams from universities or companies, and all the top performers were from China. The results were something of a repeat from last year, when Chinese scientists also dominated a field of 84 teams from around the world. To be sure, leading AI players like Google, who won top results in 2014, haven't participated in the last couple ImageNets. But China's dominance in the last two years of the competition shows just how much serious AI work is coming out of the country these days.
In this year's competitions, top results for the closely-monitored image classification challenge had an error rate of only 2.25% from a team called WMW, a small jump from the previous year's 2.99% error rate. WMW's team included two researchers from Beijing-based autonomous vehicle startup Momenta -- Jie Hu and Gang Sun -- as well as Li Shen from the University of Oxford. In an email to Forbes, the Chinese researchers said they use a technique called "squeeze and excitation," which both enhances useless feature and suppresses less useful ones of a convolutional neural network.
A big jump over the previous year happened in object detection, which refers to a computer's ability to recognize objects and identify them in an image -- there are three apples in the picture and one cat, for example. The winning team, called DBAT, achieved an accuracy of 73.1% over last year's 66.3%. The DBAT team consisted of a collection of eight researchers from China's Nanjing University and two from Imperial College London.
Since starting in 2010, ImageNet (or Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge) has emerged as an influential event in the AI research community to track the latest advances in image recognition systems. The year 2012, in particular, is regarded as a watershed moment for AI and deep learning when a team from the University of Toronto made a major breakthrough in image recognition accuracy. Led by Alex Krizhevsky, the PhD student used a deep neural network to train a model and achieved image classification error rate of 15% -- a giant leap from the previous year's rate of around 25%. His model, called AlexNet, demonstrated the viability of deep learning systems, which had been around since at least the 1950s, but until then hadn't been taken very seriously. (Krizhevsky and his advisor, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, both now work at Google's AI lab.)
“2012 was really the year when there was a massive breakthrough in accuracy, but it was also a proof of concept for deep learning models, which had been around for decades,” said Olga Russakovsky, a computer science processor at Princeton University and an ImageNet organizer. “It really was the first time these models had been shown to work in context of large-scale image recognition problems.”
Deep learning techniques have since taken off like wild fire in the AI community as well as at nearly every tech company. These AI systems very loosely resemble how the brain functions -- many neurons networked together with synapses. The systems are trained on massive sets of data and are able to pick out patterns in the data.
Following the 2012 contest, large tech companies like Google and Microsoft began taking part in ImageNet to show off their latest advances in deep learning-based image recognition systems. In 2014, Google entered the competition with a team called GoogLeNet, and made a big breakthrough in object detection accuracy: 43.9% from the previous year's 22.6% accuracy. ImageNet makes for good marketing: In 2013, AI researcher Matt Zeiler launched his AI startup, Clarifai, while achieving top results at ImageNet in image classification -- a jump to 12% error rate from Krizhevsky's 15% the year before.
ImageNet's organizers wanted to stop running the classification challenge in 2014 and focus more on object localization and detection as well as video later on, but the tech industry continued to track classification closely throughout the years.
Now, ImageNet is shutting down because of performance saturation in challenges like image classification, said Alex Berg, a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an ImageNet organizer. "There's not a lot of room on the top," he said.
"I think ImageNet is still making massive progress," added Russakovsky. "But it's healthy for the community to start focusing on perhaps other tasks, challenges or datasets."
Some in the AI community are wondering what research-focused AI challenges might take ImageNet's place. One possible contender Russakovsky points to is the COCO (or Common Objects in Context) contest. Berg is also working on putting together a challenge for image recognition based strictly on real world data using smartphone cameras. One contest, called WebVision, requires teams to train their models on images culled from the internet that haven't been exhaustively labeled, like ImageNet's dataset.
The results for the WebVision challenge were recently announced and the top performer was Shenzhen-based Malong Technologies, maker of AI developer tools for image recognition tasks. Malong achieved a 94.78% accuracy rate in classifying the web images. Malong is a private business, but it opened a joint AI research lab with Tsinghua University with official sponsorship from the Shenzhen government, which is making offers of $1 million to any AI efforts kickstarted there.
"AI is so fierce now, you need any competitive advantage you can get," said Matt Scott, cofounder and chief technology officer at Malong. "Government support is one of the very helpful things going on in China."
Click here for details on how to send me information anonymously. Follow me on Twitter @aatilley or send me an email: atilley@forbes.com
You can also find additional details of ImageNet @#197 courtesy of @JSCh and also another AI competition in below website and @#200 and 215 posted separately by @JSCh and @qwerty earlier on this thread:
SQuAD
The Stanford Question Answering Dataset
https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/
cirr
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China calls for AI alliance
2017-10-14 16:38
chinadaily.com.cn Editor: Gu Liping
China has accelerated its steps to develop artificial intelligence, as the nation calls for an alliance of leading companies and institutes to promote integration of AI resources.
"The nation is gaining ground in AI, with some advanced technologies already pioneered for the world. There is also an urgent need for companies and institutes to unite to optimize the whole industry chain to create a healthier ecology," said Lin Nianxiu, deputy director of China's National Development and Reform Commission.
He made the comments Friday, at a inauguration ceremony where an industry alliance to promote development of China's AI industry was officially established.
The alliance, backed by several state ministries and commissions including NDRC and the Ministry of Science and Technology, will be led by top-tier institutes such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
According to the alliance, more than 240 companies and institutes have participated in this platform and agreed to cooperate in this field to make strides forward.
http://www.ecns.cn/2017/10-14/277049.shtml
2017-10-14 16:38
chinadaily.com.cn Editor: Gu Liping
China has accelerated its steps to develop artificial intelligence, as the nation calls for an alliance of leading companies and institutes to promote integration of AI resources.
"The nation is gaining ground in AI, with some advanced technologies already pioneered for the world. There is also an urgent need for companies and institutes to unite to optimize the whole industry chain to create a healthier ecology," said Lin Nianxiu, deputy director of China's National Development and Reform Commission.
He made the comments Friday, at a inauguration ceremony where an industry alliance to promote development of China's AI industry was officially established.
The alliance, backed by several state ministries and commissions including NDRC and the Ministry of Science and Technology, will be led by top-tier institutes such as the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
According to the alliance, more than 240 companies and institutes have participated in this platform and agreed to cooperate in this field to make strides forward.
http://www.ecns.cn/2017/10-14/277049.shtml
beijingwalker
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China seeks dominance of global AI industry
Beijing challenges US with plan to create $150bn artificial intelligence sector
16 HOURS AGO
by Louise Lucas i
If the development of artificial intelligence is an arms race, then China wants to become the world’s unchallenged AI superpower. While the National Science Foundation in the US has no increase in funding this year, China has promised to “vigorously use governmental and social capital” to dominate the industry. US and Chinese tech companies alike are ploughing money and talent into AI, but Beijing’s blueprint for investing in artificial intelligence — creating a $150bn industry by 2030 — underlines its desire to beat the US. While industrial policy is no guarantee of success — contrary to aims, China has failed so far to create global champions in semiconductors or cars — few are dismissing Beijing’s clout in AI, the ability of machines to mimic human thinking and carry out tasks ranging from targeting advertisements to playing Go.
“2030 is too pessimistic,” says Kai-Fu Lee, a veteran of Microsoft Research and Google who now runs his own venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures in Beijing. He reels off China’s advantages: the sheer number of people; data; talent; even the superior number of lines of code being written. At 730m, China’s online population alone is almost twice the size of America’s and more tech-savvy. “Mobile [use] in China is light years ahead of anywhere else,” says one tech player. “So you have a huge experimental lab for exciting AI applications. In China we see different consumer behaviours every day, in the US it’s a lot slower.”
https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d
Beijing challenges US with plan to create $150bn artificial intelligence sector
16 HOURS AGO
by Louise Lucas i
If the development of artificial intelligence is an arms race, then China wants to become the world’s unchallenged AI superpower. While the National Science Foundation in the US has no increase in funding this year, China has promised to “vigorously use governmental and social capital” to dominate the industry. US and Chinese tech companies alike are ploughing money and talent into AI, but Beijing’s blueprint for investing in artificial intelligence — creating a $150bn industry by 2030 — underlines its desire to beat the US. While industrial policy is no guarantee of success — contrary to aims, China has failed so far to create global champions in semiconductors or cars — few are dismissing Beijing’s clout in AI, the ability of machines to mimic human thinking and carry out tasks ranging from targeting advertisements to playing Go.
“2030 is too pessimistic,” says Kai-Fu Lee, a veteran of Microsoft Research and Google who now runs his own venture capital firm Sinovation Ventures in Beijing. He reels off China’s advantages: the sheer number of people; data; talent; even the superior number of lines of code being written. At 730m, China’s online population alone is almost twice the size of America’s and more tech-savvy. “Mobile [use] in China is light years ahead of anywhere else,” says one tech player. “So you have a huge experimental lab for exciting AI applications. In China we see different consumer behaviours every day, in the US it’s a lot slower.”
https://www.ft.com/content/856753d6-8d31-11e7-a352-e46f43c5825d
cirr
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Tapping growing potential of AI industry
2017-10-17 11:20 China Daily Editor: Li Yahui
The global artificial intelligence market has experienced explosive growth in recent years, and this game-changing technology is now considered the "next big thing" after the mobile internet.
AI has a long development history but recent breakthroughs have led to a new inflection point. Advances in deep learning neural network algorithms, alongside improved computer processing power, and the abundance of big data that serves as valuable training data are all contributing to the rise of the AI industry.
China's AI industry has been growing in an exponential manner. According to Tencent Research Institute, the number of AI companies has increased more than tenfold over the past 10 years, from 57 AI companies in 2007 to 592 by June 2017. Remarkably, the number of newly established AI startups in 2015 was equivalent to the total number of AI start-ups from 1999 to 2012. In terms of fundraising, according to The Economist, Chinese AI companies received $2.6 billion investment from 2012 to 2016 while US peers received $17.9 billion over the same period. However, China has been catching up quickly in recent years.
The Chinese government has positioned AI as a national strategic priority. China, earlier seen as a technology development laggard, aims to become a world leader in AI to drive its economic transformations with it. In the most recent government policy document outlining the New Generation AI Development Plan, the State Council, the country's Cabinet, has declared an ambitious goal of becoming a world leader in AI innovation with a market size of over 1 trillion yuan ($151.86 billion) by 2030. Policies such as Made in China 2025, the Three-year Guidance for Internet Plus AI plan, and the New Generation AI Development Plan are all top-down initiatives aiming to take the nation's AI technology forward. Furthermore, local provincial and city governments are also offering preferential policies and generous financial incentives to AI start-ups. For example, the city of Tianjin recently set up a 30 billion yuan fund to support the local AI industry.
Data is the key to unlocking the potential of AI development. With 751 million internet users and 724 million smartphone users, Chinese are embracing a 24/7 connected lifestyle and adopting all kinds of new digital products and services. Their ubiquitous connectivity has led to tremendous amount of data that can be further monetized. And with the massive amount of training data sets as input, the AI algorithms are continuously self-tuning and improving. Companies are now able to leverage AI-enabled tools to develop a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of their customers and competitors.
This vibrant innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem has also fueled China's AI development. Chinese AI-based patent applications grew 186 percent between 2010 and 2014, a huge increase from the previous five-year period. Also, in the past two years, all the top-performing teams in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, an influential AI computer vision contest, were Chinese, while half the teams were Chinese-based. Meanwhile, Internet giants such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, along with rising startups like Mobvoi, iCarbonX, Megvii and SenseTime, and unicorns like Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi are all investing in or experimenting with AI technology.
Baidu is one of the major leaders in AI development in China. It established the Institute of Deep Learning in 2013 and the Silicon Valley AI Lab in 2014. In 2017, Baidu announced a shift in its strategy from mobile-first to AI-first, and recruited Qi Lu, a former executive vice president at Microsoft, as its new COO. In particular, it has launched an open-source platform for autonomous driving solutions, namely Project Apollo, to transform the global research and development landscape of self-driving vehicles.
Yet, China's AI industry still faces major challenges. First, China's academia is not doing much in fundamental scientific research, especially in the areas of advanced computer algorithms and computing infrastructure. So far, the majority of groundbreaking research is still being done in the West. Second, AI startups are good at launching new products and features to satisfy unmet market demand. However they primarily rely on business model innovation rather than technology innovation. Third, governments and venture capitalists tend to provide more incentives to commercial applications of technology over fundamental technology research, which takes more time and involves more risks.
The success of China's ambitious goal to become a world leader in AI by 2030 will hinge on the nation's innovation capabilities and long-term strategic vision. Could China eventually achieve global leadership in AI? Like everything that is related to business and technology innovations these days, it would be imprudent to count China out.
The author Edward Tse is founder& CEO, Gao Feng Advisory Company, a global strategy and management consulting firm based in China and author of China's Disruptors. Jackie Tang is a consultant with the firm.
http://www.ecns.cn/voices/2017/10-17/277353.shtml
2017-10-17 11:20 China Daily Editor: Li Yahui
The global artificial intelligence market has experienced explosive growth in recent years, and this game-changing technology is now considered the "next big thing" after the mobile internet.
AI has a long development history but recent breakthroughs have led to a new inflection point. Advances in deep learning neural network algorithms, alongside improved computer processing power, and the abundance of big data that serves as valuable training data are all contributing to the rise of the AI industry.
China's AI industry has been growing in an exponential manner. According to Tencent Research Institute, the number of AI companies has increased more than tenfold over the past 10 years, from 57 AI companies in 2007 to 592 by June 2017. Remarkably, the number of newly established AI startups in 2015 was equivalent to the total number of AI start-ups from 1999 to 2012. In terms of fundraising, according to The Economist, Chinese AI companies received $2.6 billion investment from 2012 to 2016 while US peers received $17.9 billion over the same period. However, China has been catching up quickly in recent years.
The Chinese government has positioned AI as a national strategic priority. China, earlier seen as a technology development laggard, aims to become a world leader in AI to drive its economic transformations with it. In the most recent government policy document outlining the New Generation AI Development Plan, the State Council, the country's Cabinet, has declared an ambitious goal of becoming a world leader in AI innovation with a market size of over 1 trillion yuan ($151.86 billion) by 2030. Policies such as Made in China 2025, the Three-year Guidance for Internet Plus AI plan, and the New Generation AI Development Plan are all top-down initiatives aiming to take the nation's AI technology forward. Furthermore, local provincial and city governments are also offering preferential policies and generous financial incentives to AI start-ups. For example, the city of Tianjin recently set up a 30 billion yuan fund to support the local AI industry.
Data is the key to unlocking the potential of AI development. With 751 million internet users and 724 million smartphone users, Chinese are embracing a 24/7 connected lifestyle and adopting all kinds of new digital products and services. Their ubiquitous connectivity has led to tremendous amount of data that can be further monetized. And with the massive amount of training data sets as input, the AI algorithms are continuously self-tuning and improving. Companies are now able to leverage AI-enabled tools to develop a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of their customers and competitors.
This vibrant innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem has also fueled China's AI development. Chinese AI-based patent applications grew 186 percent between 2010 and 2014, a huge increase from the previous five-year period. Also, in the past two years, all the top-performing teams in the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, an influential AI computer vision contest, were Chinese, while half the teams were Chinese-based. Meanwhile, Internet giants such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, along with rising startups like Mobvoi, iCarbonX, Megvii and SenseTime, and unicorns like Didi Chuxing and Xiaomi are all investing in or experimenting with AI technology.
Baidu is one of the major leaders in AI development in China. It established the Institute of Deep Learning in 2013 and the Silicon Valley AI Lab in 2014. In 2017, Baidu announced a shift in its strategy from mobile-first to AI-first, and recruited Qi Lu, a former executive vice president at Microsoft, as its new COO. In particular, it has launched an open-source platform for autonomous driving solutions, namely Project Apollo, to transform the global research and development landscape of self-driving vehicles.
Yet, China's AI industry still faces major challenges. First, China's academia is not doing much in fundamental scientific research, especially in the areas of advanced computer algorithms and computing infrastructure. So far, the majority of groundbreaking research is still being done in the West. Second, AI startups are good at launching new products and features to satisfy unmet market demand. However they primarily rely on business model innovation rather than technology innovation. Third, governments and venture capitalists tend to provide more incentives to commercial applications of technology over fundamental technology research, which takes more time and involves more risks.
The success of China's ambitious goal to become a world leader in AI by 2030 will hinge on the nation's innovation capabilities and long-term strategic vision. Could China eventually achieve global leadership in AI? Like everything that is related to business and technology innovations these days, it would be imprudent to count China out.
The author Edward Tse is founder& CEO, Gao Feng Advisory Company, a global strategy and management consulting firm based in China and author of China's Disruptors. Jackie Tang is a consultant with the firm.
http://www.ecns.cn/voices/2017/10-17/277353.shtml
cirr
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AI’s role in engineering contest is a yes-brainer
2017-10-18 14:00
Shanghai Daily Editor: Huang Mingrui
Artificial intelligence — the technology that was once considered too profound to be understood by the public — is now on the agenda for elementary and secondary schools.
Furthermore, an engineering competition for Shanghai students that has been running for 13 years has for the first time added AI to the program.
The Shanghai Future Engineer Competition, held by Shanghai Educational Center of Science and Arts and Shanghai Science Education Development Foundation, focuses on inspiring and cultivating youngsters interested in science and technology.
Ten thousand students from all over Shanghai have signed up for the competition and have been preparing their projects since the new semester. The final competition will be held in December.
The presence of an AI project in the competition has attracted considerable attention from in and out the education system.
Eighteen teachers from all 16 districts involved in the competition gathered at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum yesterday to attend a seminar with David Li, a renowned AI entrepreneur.
"Teaching students AI is neither about algorithms, nor the Kafkaesque fantasy in the movies, but to intrigue students' interests," said Li, who told his audience that AI is more a tool than a mathematical computer science. The teaching of AI should concentrate on the practical, he added.
"Coding AI is hard and boring but the kids do not have to know about it, they can simply use and enjoy AI," Li said.
ASML, a leading company in lithography industry, has funded 600,000 yuan (US$91,000) to the competition and has provided 16 AI control panels.
"Youth talent and AI are both cornerstones for the future, cultivating the youth to get involved into AI industry is capturing the future," said Lucas van Grisven, vice president of ASML.
According to "Development Planning for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence" published by the State Council in July, AI has now become a national strategy.
In 2015, Shanghai Science and Technology Commission launched an "artificial intelligence project based on brain science."
"We will continue strengthening education in AI," said Yao Zongqiang, secretary-general of Shanghai Science Education Development Foundation.
http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/10-18/277534.shtml
2017-10-18 14:00
Shanghai Daily Editor: Huang Mingrui
Artificial intelligence — the technology that was once considered too profound to be understood by the public — is now on the agenda for elementary and secondary schools.
Furthermore, an engineering competition for Shanghai students that has been running for 13 years has for the first time added AI to the program.
The Shanghai Future Engineer Competition, held by Shanghai Educational Center of Science and Arts and Shanghai Science Education Development Foundation, focuses on inspiring and cultivating youngsters interested in science and technology.
Ten thousand students from all over Shanghai have signed up for the competition and have been preparing their projects since the new semester. The final competition will be held in December.
The presence of an AI project in the competition has attracted considerable attention from in and out the education system.
Eighteen teachers from all 16 districts involved in the competition gathered at Shanghai Science and Technology Museum yesterday to attend a seminar with David Li, a renowned AI entrepreneur.
"Teaching students AI is neither about algorithms, nor the Kafkaesque fantasy in the movies, but to intrigue students' interests," said Li, who told his audience that AI is more a tool than a mathematical computer science. The teaching of AI should concentrate on the practical, he added.
"Coding AI is hard and boring but the kids do not have to know about it, they can simply use and enjoy AI," Li said.
ASML, a leading company in lithography industry, has funded 600,000 yuan (US$91,000) to the competition and has provided 16 AI control panels.
"Youth talent and AI are both cornerstones for the future, cultivating the youth to get involved into AI industry is capturing the future," said Lucas van Grisven, vice president of ASML.
According to "Development Planning for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence" published by the State Council in July, AI has now become a national strategy.
In 2015, Shanghai Science and Technology Commission launched an "artificial intelligence project based on brain science."
"We will continue strengthening education in AI," said Yao Zongqiang, secretary-general of Shanghai Science Education Development Foundation.
http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/10-18/277534.shtml
cirr
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Unicorn startup makes smart move into AI industry
2017-10-19 10:09 China Daily Editor: Li Yahui
Chinese chip startup Cambricon Technologies has raised $100 million from investors, making it the first "unicorn" in the country's AI semiconductor sector to be worth more than $1 billion.
Backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, the Beijing-based company is affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or CAS, and has focused on advanced chips to power deep learning computation.
This popular artificial intelligence algorithm is part of a broader push by the country's high-tech industries in the race for AI applications－the next frontier of innovation.
Last year, Cambricon unveiled its first chip, Cambricon-1A, which the company branded as the "first commercial deep learning application".
It can be used in the fields of robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles and consumer electronics.
"Most AI applications are powered by general purpose processors, which are not enough to push forward the limits of cutting-edge technologies," said Chen Tianshi, CEO and co-founder of the startup.
Cambricon-1A, he stressed, was far better than traditional chips in delivering image and speech recognition.
It also has higher integration density, making it ideal for mobile devices.
"There are differences between tailor-made AI chips and general ones. To some extent, it is like comparing kitchen knives to Swiss Army knives," said Chen Yunji, co-founder of Cambricon.
"Swiss Army knives are multifunctional, but they are not as good as kitchen knives when chopping meat," he added.
Cambricon was founded last year by the two Chens, both researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology, which is part of the CAS.
In 2016, the company also received 100 million yuan ($15 million) in licensing fees for its Cambricon-1A chip from smartphone manufacturers and wearable device makers, DigiTimes, a daily newspaper for the semiconductor and electronics sectors, reported.
During August, the startup announced it had raised $100 million in series A funding. This was led by SDIC Chuangye Investment Management, a subsidiary of China's State Development & Investment Corp.
Other prominent investors included e-commerce giant Alibaba, computer manufacturer Lenovo Group Ltd, robotics firm Zhongke Tuling Century Beijing Technology and the investment arm of the CAS.
Four months earlier, Cambricon had received $1.4 million from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The cash will be used to accelerate the company's AI chip technology program in high performance cloud computing platforms, as well as in smartphones and wearables, Chen Tianshi pointed out.
"We will focus on both in-device AI and cloud AI," he said, adding that the firm's clients already include iFlytek Co Ltd, a leading Chinese voice recognition business, and State-owned Sugon Information Industry Co Ltd.
Indeed, the future looks bright for Cambricon, even in a global marketplace which is highly competitive.
Demand for AI chips is growing, according to Roger Sheng, a senior analyst at research company Gartner Inc.
"There is rigid demand for AI chips in security, military, video AI algorithms and other sectors in China," he said. "There is no need for Cambricon to worry about orders, as long as its technologies are strong enough."
In July, China unveiled a national development plan to build a 1 trillion yuan AI core industry by 2030. This is supposed to stimulate as much as 10 trillion yuan in related businesses.
http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/10-19/277625.shtml
@Bussard Ramjet India?
2017-10-19 10:09 China Daily Editor: Li Yahui
Chinese chip startup Cambricon Technologies has raised $100 million from investors, making it the first "unicorn" in the country's AI semiconductor sector to be worth more than $1 billion.
Backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, the Beijing-based company is affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, or CAS, and has focused on advanced chips to power deep learning computation.
This popular artificial intelligence algorithm is part of a broader push by the country's high-tech industries in the race for AI applications－the next frontier of innovation.
Last year, Cambricon unveiled its first chip, Cambricon-1A, which the company branded as the "first commercial deep learning application".
It can be used in the fields of robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles and consumer electronics.
"Most AI applications are powered by general purpose processors, which are not enough to push forward the limits of cutting-edge technologies," said Chen Tianshi, CEO and co-founder of the startup.
Cambricon-1A, he stressed, was far better than traditional chips in delivering image and speech recognition.
It also has higher integration density, making it ideal for mobile devices.
"There are differences between tailor-made AI chips and general ones. To some extent, it is like comparing kitchen knives to Swiss Army knives," said Chen Yunji, co-founder of Cambricon.
"Swiss Army knives are multifunctional, but they are not as good as kitchen knives when chopping meat," he added.
Cambricon was founded last year by the two Chens, both researchers at the Institute of Computing Technology, which is part of the CAS.
In 2016, the company also received 100 million yuan ($15 million) in licensing fees for its Cambricon-1A chip from smartphone manufacturers and wearable device makers, DigiTimes, a daily newspaper for the semiconductor and electronics sectors, reported.
During August, the startup announced it had raised $100 million in series A funding. This was led by SDIC Chuangye Investment Management, a subsidiary of China's State Development & Investment Corp.
Other prominent investors included e-commerce giant Alibaba, computer manufacturer Lenovo Group Ltd, robotics firm Zhongke Tuling Century Beijing Technology and the investment arm of the CAS.
Four months earlier, Cambricon had received $1.4 million from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The cash will be used to accelerate the company's AI chip technology program in high performance cloud computing platforms, as well as in smartphones and wearables, Chen Tianshi pointed out.
"We will focus on both in-device AI and cloud AI," he said, adding that the firm's clients already include iFlytek Co Ltd, a leading Chinese voice recognition business, and State-owned Sugon Information Industry Co Ltd.
Indeed, the future looks bright for Cambricon, even in a global marketplace which is highly competitive.
Demand for AI chips is growing, according to Roger Sheng, a senior analyst at research company Gartner Inc.
"There is rigid demand for AI chips in security, military, video AI algorithms and other sectors in China," he said. "There is no need for Cambricon to worry about orders, as long as its technologies are strong enough."
In July, China unveiled a national development plan to build a 1 trillion yuan AI core industry by 2030. This is supposed to stimulate as much as 10 trillion yuan in related businesses.
http://www.ecns.cn/business/2017/10-19/277625.shtml
@Bussard Ramjet India?
Intel leads US$100m funding round for Chinese AI start-up Horizon Robotics
Horizon founder Yu Kai, a former leading AI scientist at Baidu, says the company’s goal is to become “the Intel of the AI age”
PUBLISHED : Friday, 20 October, 2017, 3:19pm
UPDATED : Friday, 20 October, 2017, 3:19pm
Horizon Robotics, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, expects to close a US$100 million funding round led by Intel Capital – the global chip giant’s venture capital’s arm – by the end of this year.
Other investors in the round including China-based Harvest Investments and Morningside Venture Capital.
Intel said the funding in Horizon was part of a series of investments worth more than US$60 million it has made recently in 15 global tech start-ups, focused on data.
Beijing-based Horizon said in a live webcast in San Francisco run by Intel the funds will be used to speed up its research and development of AI technology, and its related products.
Horizon was founded in 2015 by Yu Kai, a former head of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, and builds chips to power artificial intelligence in self-driving vehicles and smart cameras.
Yu was previously quoted as saying by various media sources that the company’s goal is to become “the Intel of the AI age”, just as Intel was the one of the icons of the PC era.
The world’s more than 1,000 categories of AI-driven devices, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cameras, will be equipped with “brains” in future, Horizon said, adding these will be embedded in physical devices to become intelligent entities that have the ability for perceive, understand and decision-make for safety, convenience and fun.
Intel Capital officials also said during the webcast it has made new investments recently in 15 global tech firms, pushing its total commitment to more than US$566 million this year.
Ten of those 15 are in the US – eight in California, with one each in New York and Portland, Oregon. The others include two Tel Aviv-based start-ups, and one Canadian one Japanese.
“The world is undergoing a data explosion,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel’s senior vice-president and president of Intel Capital.
He expects every autonomous vehicle on the road to be creating 4 terabytes of data per day by 2020, adding that a million self-driving cars will be able to create the same amount of data every day, as three billion people.
As its parent transitions into a “data company”, he said Intel Capital will continue to invest in various tech start-ups that can help expand the data ecosystem and “pathfind” important new technologies.
As an aside, he added, too, that currently more than 10 per cent of Intel Capital’s portfolio companies are led by women or “under-represented minorities”, including African Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Latinos.
-------------------------------------------
Former IBM Watson Chief Scientist Joins JD
ChinaTechNews.com EditorOctober 11, 2017, 9:31:02 am HKT
Zhou Bowen, an authoritative scientist in the artificial intelligence sector, joined e-commerce firm JD as vice president of JD Group.
In his new role, Zhou will be responsible for businesses related to JD's AI research and platform unit. Zhou will directly report to JD Group's chairman and chief executive officer Liu Qiangdong.
JD's AI research and platform unit will focus on AI algorithm innovation and expanding AI for retail infrastructures.
Before joining JD, Zhou worked at IBM's New York headquarters as head of AI Foundations of IBM Research. As chief scientist of IBM Watson, Zhou was in charge of IBM Worldwide's strategy and implementation of basic research of artificial intelligence and deep learning. Under his leadership, Zhou's team participated in the algorithm development, engineering and commercial realization, and application of Watson's artificial intelligence platform.
In the professional area, Zhou published over one hundred papers on world-class journals and at top academic conferences. Their contents cover artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural semantic understanding, machine translation, and speech recognition.
Horizon founder Yu Kai, a former leading AI scientist at Baidu, says the company’s goal is to become “the Intel of the AI age”
PUBLISHED : Friday, 20 October, 2017, 3:19pm
UPDATED : Friday, 20 October, 2017, 3:19pm
Horizon Robotics, the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, expects to close a US$100 million funding round led by Intel Capital – the global chip giant’s venture capital’s arm – by the end of this year.
Other investors in the round including China-based Harvest Investments and Morningside Venture Capital.
Intel said the funding in Horizon was part of a series of investments worth more than US$60 million it has made recently in 15 global tech start-ups, focused on data.
Beijing-based Horizon said in a live webcast in San Francisco run by Intel the funds will be used to speed up its research and development of AI technology, and its related products.
Horizon was founded in 2015 by Yu Kai, a former head of Baidu’s Institute of Deep Learning, and builds chips to power artificial intelligence in self-driving vehicles and smart cameras.
Yu was previously quoted as saying by various media sources that the company’s goal is to become “the Intel of the AI age”, just as Intel was the one of the icons of the PC era.
The world’s more than 1,000 categories of AI-driven devices, such as autonomous vehicles and smart cameras, will be equipped with “brains” in future, Horizon said, adding these will be embedded in physical devices to become intelligent entities that have the ability for perceive, understand and decision-make for safety, convenience and fun.
Intel Capital officials also said during the webcast it has made new investments recently in 15 global tech firms, pushing its total commitment to more than US$566 million this year.
Ten of those 15 are in the US – eight in California, with one each in New York and Portland, Oregon. The others include two Tel Aviv-based start-ups, and one Canadian one Japanese.
“The world is undergoing a data explosion,” said Wendell Brooks, Intel’s senior vice-president and president of Intel Capital.
He expects every autonomous vehicle on the road to be creating 4 terabytes of data per day by 2020, adding that a million self-driving cars will be able to create the same amount of data every day, as three billion people.
As its parent transitions into a “data company”, he said Intel Capital will continue to invest in various tech start-ups that can help expand the data ecosystem and “pathfind” important new technologies.
As an aside, he added, too, that currently more than 10 per cent of Intel Capital’s portfolio companies are led by women or “under-represented minorities”, including African Americans, American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Latinos.
Code:
http://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/2116265/intel-leads-us100m-funding-round-chinese-ai-start-horizon-robotics-------------------------------------------
Former IBM Watson Chief Scientist Joins JD
ChinaTechNews.com EditorOctober 11, 2017, 9:31:02 am HKT
Zhou Bowen, an authoritative scientist in the artificial intelligence sector, joined e-commerce firm JD as vice president of JD Group.
In his new role, Zhou will be responsible for businesses related to JD's AI research and platform unit. Zhou will directly report to JD Group's chairman and chief executive officer Liu Qiangdong.
JD's AI research and platform unit will focus on AI algorithm innovation and expanding AI for retail infrastructures.
Before joining JD, Zhou worked at IBM's New York headquarters as head of AI Foundations of IBM Research. As chief scientist of IBM Watson, Zhou was in charge of IBM Worldwide's strategy and implementation of basic research of artificial intelligence and deep learning. Under his leadership, Zhou's team participated in the algorithm development, engineering and commercial realization, and application of Watson's artificial intelligence platform.
In the professional area, Zhou published over one hundred papers on world-class journals and at top academic conferences. Their contents cover artificial intelligence, deep learning, natural semantic understanding, machine translation, and speech recognition.
Code:
https://www.chinatechnews.com/2017/10/11/25494-former-ibm-watson-chief-scientist-joins-jd
Last edited:
looks like samsung & mediatek next-gen mobile SOC will have chinese NPU. lol
---
Samsung invests in China AI chip start-up DeePhi
23rd October 2017
Samsung has made a ‘significant’ investment in DeePhi Tech, an AI IC specialist founded last year by four graduates from Tsinghua University and Stanford, reports The Korea Times.
‘We provide end-to-end solutions utilising deep compression and a DPU platform. Leveraging the optimisation of co-designed neural networks and FPGAs, DeePhi provides more efficient, convenient and economical inference platforms for both embedded end and server-side, including but not limited to data centres and surveillance,’ says DeePhi.
Other investors in DeePhi are Mediatek, AWS, Xilinx and Tsinghua University.
Korea’s SK Telecom is said to have offered to invest in DeePhi but the offer was turned down.
DeePhi’s attractions are said to include its neural network compression technology and neural network hardware architecture.
DeePhi has the Deep Neural Network Development Kit, DNNDK, which is a deep learning software development kit aimed at simplifying and accelerating deep learning applications.
Samsung is said to be interested in mobile applications for DeePhi’s neural net-based AI chipsets like speech recognition, neural language processing and other recognition tasks on smartphones.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Exynos may have neural engine co-processor for AI, similar to Apple's A11
Posted: 23 Oct 2017, 05:35 , by Daniel P.
"Apple A11 Bionic neural engine," "Google Pixel Visual Core" - those are all buzz phrases to mark a growing trend in today's latest smartphone chipsets, namely specialized co-processors for niche tasks that offload those from generic main processor cores. This way the job in question - processing sensory input and Face ID visual calculations in Apple's case, or aiding the HDR+ camera algorithms in Google's Pixels - gets done much faster, way better, and with less battery drain than if you task it to the stock processor.
Needless to say, Samsung may soon be following suit with a custom neural engine co-processor for its own Exynos brand of chipsets, as it just invested a hefty amount into a Chinese AI company called DeePhi Tech. Founded by Tsinghua and Stanford university graduates, the firm has already bagged plenty of high-profile clients like Amazon, MediaTek, and Samsung itself, for its unique neural network chipset architecture and compression technology.
It specializes particularly in developing deep learning AI algorithms to go with its neural network chip designs, and Samsung may have invested in DeePhi in order to develop such a co-processor to its Exynos 9810 silicon that is expected to land with the Galaxy S9 in the spring. It's not the first time we are hearing that the next Exynos may have an AI chippery inside, and there was even a rumor that the S9 will arrive with a Face ID-styled 3D scanning kit of its own, so there you have it. Qualcomm already outed a software development kit for its Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine this summer, so the competition in the field is about to get fierce.
---
Samsung invests in China AI chip start-up DeePhi
23rd October 2017
Samsung has made a ‘significant’ investment in DeePhi Tech, an AI IC specialist founded last year by four graduates from Tsinghua University and Stanford, reports The Korea Times.
‘We provide end-to-end solutions utilising deep compression and a DPU platform. Leveraging the optimisation of co-designed neural networks and FPGAs, DeePhi provides more efficient, convenient and economical inference platforms for both embedded end and server-side, including but not limited to data centres and surveillance,’ says DeePhi.
Other investors in DeePhi are Mediatek, AWS, Xilinx and Tsinghua University.
Korea’s SK Telecom is said to have offered to invest in DeePhi but the offer was turned down.
DeePhi’s attractions are said to include its neural network compression technology and neural network hardware architecture.
DeePhi has the Deep Neural Network Development Kit, DNNDK, which is a deep learning software development kit aimed at simplifying and accelerating deep learning applications.
Samsung is said to be interested in mobile applications for DeePhi’s neural net-based AI chipsets like speech recognition, neural language processing and other recognition tasks on smartphones.
Code:
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/samsung-invests-china-ai-chip-company-deephi-2017-10/Next Exynos may have neural engine co-processor for AI, similar to Apple's A11
Posted: 23 Oct 2017, 05:35 , by Daniel P.
"Apple A11 Bionic neural engine," "Google Pixel Visual Core" - those are all buzz phrases to mark a growing trend in today's latest smartphone chipsets, namely specialized co-processors for niche tasks that offload those from generic main processor cores. This way the job in question - processing sensory input and Face ID visual calculations in Apple's case, or aiding the HDR+ camera algorithms in Google's Pixels - gets done much faster, way better, and with less battery drain than if you task it to the stock processor.
Needless to say, Samsung may soon be following suit with a custom neural engine co-processor for its own Exynos brand of chipsets, as it just invested a hefty amount into a Chinese AI company called DeePhi Tech. Founded by Tsinghua and Stanford university graduates, the firm has already bagged plenty of high-profile clients like Amazon, MediaTek, and Samsung itself, for its unique neural network chipset architecture and compression technology.
It specializes particularly in developing deep learning AI algorithms to go with its neural network chip designs, and Samsung may have invested in DeePhi in order to develop such a co-processor to its Exynos 9810 silicon that is expected to land with the Galaxy S9 in the spring. It's not the first time we are hearing that the next Exynos may have an AI chippery inside, and there was even a rumor that the S9 will arrive with a Face ID-styled 3D scanning kit of its own, so there you have it. Qualcomm already outed a software development kit for its Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine this summer, so the competition in the field is about to get fierce.
Code:
https://www.phonearena.com/news/Next-Exynos-may-have-neural-engine-co-processor-for-AI-similar-to-Apples-A11_id99172
Last edited:
huawei ai chip core is licensed from chinese startup cambricon. samsung ai chip will be from deephi from the look of it. this is jackpot having two top big players in mobile industry using their sh1t. i hope they don't end up like imagination later onChina needs, at least, to be among the leading pack when it comes to AI.
Huawei with an AI chip:
Last edited:
TaiShang
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Oct 23, 2017 06:53 PM
Segway-Maker Ninebot Wins Financing for AI Drive
By Mo Yelin
The artificial-intelligence efforts of Ninebot Ltd., the Chinese manufacturer of the Segway, has won support from the Chinese government, which selected the firm to help draft standards for self-balancing transportation systems. Above, 9-year-old Rayen Koan rides his Segway in Los Angeles in December 2015. Photo: Visual China
Ninebot Ltd., the Tianjin-based manufacturer of the popular Segway two-wheeler, has raised $100 million for robot and short-distance transportation development projects.
Providing the financial support was the China Mobile Innovation Industry Fund and a fund managed by SDIC Innovation, Ninebot announced on its website.
Artificial intelligence (AI) projects are also on the agenda at 5-year-old Ninebot, which purchased the U.S. developer of the one-person, two-wheeled Segway vehicle in 2015 with financial support from Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc.
Other Ninebot investors include the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and U.S. chip-maker Intel Corp.
Ninebot’s personal transportation business is called Segway PT (which stands for “personal transportation”), and Segway Robotics, which includes AI initiatives.
The personal transportation unit encompassed Segway Discovery, which offers two-wheeler rentals in tourist areas, resorts and urban districts worldwide. More than 1,000 Segway rental outlets are operating globally.
The company recently unveiled its first consumer-market robot, Segway Loomo, which features an AI system with speech and hearing functions so that the machine can interact with people.
Ninebot’s AI efforts have won support from the Chinese government, which selected the firm to help draft standards for self-balancing transportation systems.
Wan Gang, who heads the Ministry of Science and Technology, signaled the government’s interest by visiting Ninebot’s Beijing office last week, the company said.
“As the government has invested heavily in the (AI) area, many startups and big corporations are also committing to building their own AI systems,” Wan said. “Ninebot can also contribute to that.”
Contact reporter Mo Yelin (yelinmo@caixin.com)
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-10-23/101160050.html
Segway-Maker Ninebot Wins Financing for AI Drive
By Mo Yelin
The artificial-intelligence efforts of Ninebot Ltd., the Chinese manufacturer of the Segway, has won support from the Chinese government, which selected the firm to help draft standards for self-balancing transportation systems. Above, 9-year-old Rayen Koan rides his Segway in Los Angeles in December 2015. Photo: Visual China
Ninebot Ltd., the Tianjin-based manufacturer of the popular Segway two-wheeler, has raised $100 million for robot and short-distance transportation development projects.
Providing the financial support was the China Mobile Innovation Industry Fund and a fund managed by SDIC Innovation, Ninebot announced on its website.
Artificial intelligence (AI) projects are also on the agenda at 5-year-old Ninebot, which purchased the U.S. developer of the one-person, two-wheeled Segway vehicle in 2015 with financial support from Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc.
Other Ninebot investors include the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital and U.S. chip-maker Intel Corp.
Ninebot’s personal transportation business is called Segway PT (which stands for “personal transportation”), and Segway Robotics, which includes AI initiatives.
The personal transportation unit encompassed Segway Discovery, which offers two-wheeler rentals in tourist areas, resorts and urban districts worldwide. More than 1,000 Segway rental outlets are operating globally.
The company recently unveiled its first consumer-market robot, Segway Loomo, which features an AI system with speech and hearing functions so that the machine can interact with people.
Ninebot’s AI efforts have won support from the Chinese government, which selected the firm to help draft standards for self-balancing transportation systems.
Wan Gang, who heads the Ministry of Science and Technology, signaled the government’s interest by visiting Ninebot’s Beijing office last week, the company said.
“As the government has invested heavily in the (AI) area, many startups and big corporations are also committing to building their own AI systems,” Wan said. “Ninebot can also contribute to that.”
Contact reporter Mo Yelin (yelinmo@caixin.com)
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2017-10-23/101160050.html
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Live: 2017 GeekPwn in Shanghai
Live · Started 14:30, Oct 24, 2017 (BJT)
Shanghai, China
GeekPwn is the first global security Geek Contest for Smart Life. GeekPwn has been at the forefront of the technology, and this year in Shanghai, GeekPwn will continue to explore AI security.
Live · Started 14:30, Oct 24, 2017 (BJT)
Shanghai, China
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