China's Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology

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Alibaba uses AI to get smart on pig husbandry

2018-02-14 23:29 Xinhua Editor: Wang Fan

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has decided to use AI technology to help China boost its pig-husbandry industry, which has long been plagued with poor efficiency and high labor costs.

An AI program could help identify and predict diseases and boost fertility by analyzing swine behavior, according to an online announcement last week by Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba's cloud computing arm.

Teaming up with livestock farming companies Sichuan Tequ Group and Dekon Group, the e-commerce giant has invested millions of yuan to build an AI system that can keep a record of every single hog, including their breed, age in days, diet, weight and movement.

The system is able to help each sow give birth to three more piglets per year and reduce the mortality rate by around 3 percent, according to an early-stage experiment.

"If you have 10 million pigs to raise, you can barely count how many piglets were born on a daily basis when the due date comes," said Zhang Haifeng, chief information officer of Tequ Group.

Alibaba's AI technologies can automatically record the number of births and tell if a sow can give a natural birth or not. For example, AI can locate and rescue a troubled piglet by analyzing its screams to see if it is being pressed too tight by its mother, according to Zhang.

"On one hand, we hope to bring down husbandry costs and achieve agricultural reform," said Zhang Sheng, big data expert and head of the program with Alibaba Cloud. "On the other hand, we'd like to translate AI technology into safe, tasty pork."

The AI program featuring pig farming is just one part of Alibaba's "ET Brain Plan," which has already been applied in fields such as civil aviation, transportation, environment and medical service.

"Alibaba is expanding its business in agriculture. Apart from the pig farming industry, we hope AI can help make Chinese crop farming more efficient and less labor-intensive," Zhang Sheng said.

http://www.ecns.cn/2018/02-14/292803.shtml

 

[TaiShang]

Tech Frontier: China roars ahead in AI race

Source: CGTN Published: 2018/2/20 14:37:24

Cashier-free supermarket at the headquarters of JD.com in Daxing District, Beijing. Photo:VCG

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a buzz word in the tech sector. China is also actively exploring this area.

The AI industry is experiencing a period of rapid growth. Many international and domestic companies are making their attempts to grab a share of the fast-growing market.

iFLYTEK is a national key software enterprise focused on the research of intelligent speech and language technologies.

The company developed an AI voice technology, which has been used in multiple areas such as smart education, smart healthcare, smart office, smart transportation and smart media.

"It might take an experienced doctor five minutes to analyze an X-ray, but now, it takes just one second for our AI system to go over 200 X-rays. Therefore, the system can assist the doctor with some fundamental work," said Jiang Tao, senior vice president of iFLYTEK.

The AI industry in China not only made huge progress in voice interaction, but also has outstanding performance in visual technologies. Thus, a large number of smart video editing companies emerged in China.

YI + is one of the companies focusing on the development of AI computer vision engines. The company's CEO, Zhang Mo, said that they are developing technologies, which could provide smart and commercial solution for the media, broadcast and TV industry.

In the future, AI will be more widely used in the visual sector with far-reaching influence on online traffic, viewer and box office value prediction, content examination and approval and public management.

One of the largest e-commerce platforms in China, JD.com launched the first cashier-free supermarket at its headquarter in Daxing District of Beijing.

Their AI systems can help businesses to realize targeted marketing, reduce cost and deliver more flexible shopping experience for consumers.

"The establishment of the cashier-free supermarket only costs about 15 percent more than conventional convenience stores due to the adoption of smart devices, and the cost will be further reduced in our future expansion," said Mu Guangsen, director of JD.com cashier-free supermarket. "That is to say, the cost is acceptable."

The cashier-free supermarket has advantage in both efficiency and cost. Mu believes that the cost of cashier-free supermarket will be significantly reduced after realizing scaled development.

 

[cirr]

China overtakes US in AI startup funding with a focus on facial recognition and chips

By James Vincent@jjvincent Feb 22, 2018, 9:35am

A facial recognition powered “Smile to Pay” booth created by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

do have some hard numbers, even they are open to interpretation. The latest comes from technology analysts CB Insights, which reports that China has overtaken the US in the funding of AI startups. The country accounted for 48 percent of the world’s total AI startup funding in 2017, compared to 38 percent for the US.

It’s not a straightforward victory for China, however. In terms of the volume of individual deals, the country only accounts for 9 percent of the total, while the US leads in both the total number of AI startups and total funding overall. The bottom line is that China is ahead when it comes to the dollar value of AI startup funding, which CB Insights says shows the country is “aggressively executing a thoroughly-designed vision for AI.”

China’s natural advantages in AI are well-documented. Compared to the US, it has a huge population (1.4 billion), which offers a wealth of data and opportunity for companies to scale quickly. Its AI sector also has the backing of a central government that’s able to quickly shift resources (as opposed to the missing-in-action White House), and the country’s looser approach to digital regulations means companies can experiment more freely.

China’s proportion of global AI startup funding as a percentage of dollar value.
Image: CB Insights

But these qualities can have downsides, too. The looser regulatory atmosphere, for example, is reflected by the fact that a major recipient of AI funding in China is facial recognition. This technology is widespread in the country’s cities, used for everything from identifying jaywalkers to allocating toilet paper. More significantly, it’s also been embraced by the government as a tool for surveillance and tracking. This is a technological advantage that US citizens probably wouldn’t want to replicate.

Along with facial recognition, CB Insights notes that China’s chip sector is also a big recipient of AI startup funding. New companies like Cambricon (which raised $100 million last August) are building processors designed to handle the demands of machine learning. But again, context is useful. Because while more money for AI chips may be going to China’s startups, in the US, it’s established companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Intel that are pouring resources into the same cause.

In the US vs. China AI competition, even when we have numbers, it’s difficult (and probably impossible) to judge a “winner” — for now, anyway.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/22/17039696/china-us-ai-funding-startup-comparison

 

[cirr]

Chinese students work on the Ares, a humanoid bipedal robot designed by them with funding from a Shanghai investment company, displayed during the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Oct. 21, 2016. China's goal is to transform the country into a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade. Ng Han Guan AP

NATIONAL SECURITY

Seeking to outsmart US, China races ahead on artificial intelligence

BY TIM JOHNSON

tjohnson@mcclatchydc.com

February 21, 2018 05:00 AM

Updated February 21, 2018 03:13 PM

WASHINGTON - When a Google computer program beat the world’s best player of an ancient Chinese board game last May, it might have seemed like an incremental milestone.

But for some, the success of the program known as AlphaGo marked more than a man vs. machine clash. It set up a broader race between China and the United States over artificial intelligence, a competition that could mold the future of humankind just as the widespread arrival of electricity did in the last century.

The Go tournament took place in Wuzhen, a city of canals that is more than 1,300 years old, a fitting venue for a competition involving the strategy board game Go that has been played for several thousand years. Go is renowned for its complexity, and it is said that there are more variations to the game than there are atoms in the universe.

Perhaps it was a coincidence of timing, but the AlphaGo competition kicked off events that demonstrated China’s resolve to close the gap with — and quickly surpass — the United States in deploying artificial intelligence, or AI. Goals Chinese authorities announced last July are ambitious: Reach parity with the United States by 2020, achieve major breakthroughs by 2025, and “occupy the commanding heights of AI technology by 2030” as the world’s undisputed leader.

Can China do it? Experts say the race is in its early stages but the challenge has been set, and China is taking action to move toward its aspirations.

“There’s a lot of ambition, a lot of enthusiasm but it still remains to be seen whether this is possible,” said Elsa B. Kania, a specialist in artificial intelligence and Chinese defense innovation at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington. Nonetheless, she added, “there is a very real chance and possibility” that China could achieve its goals.

The stakes are high. Advances in artificial intelligence could add trillions of dollars to a major economy and give an edge on the battlefield, shifting empires and global power.

“For the moment, the United States is the most advanced AI country in the world. But that gap is closing,” said Chris Nicholson, chief executive of Skymind, a San Francisco start-up that focuses on deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence.

Russia, too, is paying attention, although it is not in the same tier as China and the U.S.

WHOEVER BECOMES THE LEADER IN THIS SPHERE WILL BECOME THE RULER OF THE WORLD.

Russian leader Vladimir Putin

“Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind,” Russian leader Vladimir Putin told students Sept. 1, according to the state-run RT network. “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

Processors equipped with artificial intelligence algorithms and specialized hardware platforms learn from experience, adapt to new information and perform human-like tasks. The field is in its relative infancy, and numbers of top scientists are limited. Google, the Mountain View, California, technology giant, employs at least half of the top 100 of them, the Eurasia Group, a New York-based political risk consultancy, estimated in a report in December.

But China has some comparative advantages, and it is moving fast. Last year, its scientists sought 641 patents related to artificial intelligence, compared with 130 in the United States, says CB Insights, a venture capital database company.

Other metrics also show China’s push. Every year, top experts gather for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. In 2012, U.S. researchers presented 41 percent of the papers at the meeting, and Chinese experts barely hit 10 percent, said Avi Goldfarb, a professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

In 2017, he said, U.S. share of papers fell to 34 percent and China’s grew to 23 percent.

“What’s really happened is that China has invested a lot and done much better,” said Goldfarb, co-author of Prediction Machines: The simple economics of Artificial Intelligence.

One of China’s comparative advantages in artificial intelligence is the massive data that the government and large internet companies collect on the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens.

In China, people use their mobile phones to pay for goods 50 times more often than in the United States, says Sinovation Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm with offices in China and the United States. Chinese order 10 times more food delivery volume than in the United States. And shared bicycle usage is 300 times that of the United States, the company says.

ALL OF THAT IS DATA THAT GOES BACK TO TRAIN AI MODELS.

Kai-fu Lee, founder of Sinovation Ventures

“All of that is data that goes back to train AI models,” Kai-fu Lee, Sinovation’s founder and a former Google executive, told an MIT forum Nov. 2 on the future of work.

A Chinese bike-sharing company, Mobike, has fleets in 200 cities globally. Its sensor-equipped bikes transmit 20 terabytes of data for Mobike to analyze with artificial intelligence every day.

China’s government has moved heavily into facial recognition software designed to keep tabs on the populace. It has done so through unique levels of partnership with private Chinese tech companies, like Yitu Tech, one of many big firms that cooperate closely with authorities.

Lee, the former Google executive, said massive datasets give China an upper hand.

“A very good scientist with a ton of data will beat a super scientist with a small amount of data any day,” Lee told the MIT forum.

Given such an advantage, venture capital money is pouring into China-based startups pursuing aspects of artificial intelligence. Such startups took 48 percent of all dollars going to AI startups globally in 2017, surpassing the United States for share of dollars, CB Insights says.

While competition to harness artificial intelligence is real, it is unlike the race to develop a nuclear bomb before and during World War II. A remarkable degree of commercial overlap occurs between the two countries, and some experts don’t see an inevitable winner and loser in the competition.

“There’s a lot connectivity between Beijing and Shanghai and Hangzhou and (Silicon) Valley,” said Paul S. Triolo, director of global technology at Eurasia Group.

Microsoft and Google have large operations involved in artificial intelligence research in China, he said, “and Chinese companies like Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent have lots of AI researchers working in the U.S. Who’s winning that?”

IT’S NOT A RACE TO BUILD THE FIRST NUCLEAR WEAPON.

Paul S. Triolo, Eurasia Group

“It’s not a race to build the first nuclear weapon. It’s a set of very diffuse capabilities that are used as part of bigger systems,” Triolo said.

The extent of how artificial intelligence might impact everyday life is not yet known. One prominent expert, Andrew Ng, a former chief scientist at Baidu who now heads a research group at Stanford University, compares the transformative power of AI to electricity, noting how electrical refrigeration transformed agriculture, the electric motor remade manufacturing and the telegraph revolutionized communications.

“If it is like electricity, it can transform economies, societies and militaries in ways that we can imagine and ways that we probably can’t imagine yet,” Kania said.

The potential has seized the attention of the People’s Liberation Army, which makes little secret that it sees artificial intelligence as augmenting China’s power. Military commanders paid close attention last year to the contest surrounding AlphaGo, which was developed by a Google subsidiary, DeepMind, based in London.

“The PLA wants an AlphaGo for warfare,” Kania said.

One way that artificial intelligence may be deployed is in swarm warfare — the use of scores —maybe hundreds —of flying or undersea drones to disrupt enemy ships and submarines.

Such fleets of drones, harnessed with the right algorithms, could be used “to overwhelm and saturate very high-value weapons platforms,” Kania said, like aircraft carriers.

“We’re entering a new age of warfare where AI and robotics will be much more integral to military power,” she said, noting that battlefield action might become so rapid that “humans can’t keep up.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/national-security/article201152079.html
Drone race: Human versus artificial intelligence

In a world fraught with obstacles, who will prevail in a race against time: human or machine? See what happens when JPL engineers race a drone controlled by artificial intelligence against another guided by a professional human pilot. NASA

China has put some of its prowess on display. In an exhibition Dec. 7, a swarm of 1,180 drones took part in a nighttime flyover light show over the southern city of Guangzhou, spelling out “hello” and “innovation” to visiting dignitaries. Intel, the U.S. tech giant, flew more than 1,200 illuminated drones this month for the opening of the Pyeongchang Olympic Games.

As China makes headway, some U.S. experts voice concern, even alarm.

“I’m assuming that our lead will continue over the next five years, and that China will catch up extremely quickly,” Eric Schmidt, then-executive chairman of Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., said at a forum in November.

But Schmidt lamented what he saw as a lack of a U.S. governmental focus on how to forge ahead robustly in artificial intelligence.

WE DON’T HAVE A NATIONAL STRATEGY.

Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc.

“We don’t have a national strategy,” Schmidt said. “If you believe that this is important – as I suspect all of us do, but certainly I believe – then we need to get our act together as a country.”

Forecasters can only estimate the economic impact of artificial intelligence, but when they do the numbers are extraordinary. PwC, a global management consultancy, said in a study last year that artificial intelligence could add $7 trillion to the Chinese economy and $3.7 trillion to the North American economy by 2030.

It would impact areas such as self-driving cars, improved imaging diagnostics, better fraud detection, efficient energy consumption, greater tailoring of apparel and consumer items, and personalized delivery of entertainment.

Industry experts are appealing to lawmakers to sustain the current U.S. edge.

“AI is the biggest economic and technological revolution to take place in our lifetime. … We can’t afford to allow other countries to overtake us,” Ian Buck, vice president for accelerated computing at Nvidia, a Santa Clara, California, manufacturer of circuits used in super-fast processing, said in prepared remarks to a House subcommittee Feb. 14.

Nicholson, the San Francisco entrepreneur, said the Trump administration has cut research and development programs, blocked mathematicians from the Middle East and curtailed foreign investment in areas like artificial intelligence.

“The United States is adopting policies that will make it lose this race,” he said.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nat...-security/article201152079.html#storylink=cpy

 

[cirr]

Scientists hone AI tool to prevent blindness

2018-02-24 08:48

Global Times Editor: Huang Mingrui

Chinese scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to screen patients with serious eye diseases that are treatable if detected in the early stages and the technology is expected to be applied to wider uses in medicine.

A paper, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, showed that researchers used an AI-based convolutional neural network to review more than 200,000 eye scans conducted with optical coherence tomography, a noninvasive technology that bounces light off the retina to create two- and three-dimensional representations of tissue.

Researchers then employed a technique called transfer learning in which knowledge gained in solving one problem is stored by a computer and applied to different but related problems. For example, an AI neural network with optimized recognition of discrete anatomical structures of the eye like the retina, cornea or optic nerve can identify and evaluate their condition when examining images of a whole eye.

It is quicker and more efficient than previous tools that took millions of images to train an AI system, a researcher said.

"Machine learning is often like a black box where we don't know exactly what is happening," said the paper's senior author Zhang Kang, professor of ophthalmology at Shiley Eye Institute, the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center.

The study focused on two common causes of irreversible blindness: macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. Both conditions are treatable if detected early.

The researchers also tested their tool for diagnosing childhood pneumonia, based on machine analyses of chest X-rays. They found the computer was able to differentiate between viral and bacterial pneumonia with greater than 90 percent accuracy.

"The future is more data, more computational power and more experience of the people using this system so that we can provide the best patient care possible, while still being cost-effective," he said.

http://www.ecns.cn/2018/02-24/293354.shtml

 

[cirr]

Xiaomi, Microsoft plan AI cooperation

2018-02-24 08:55 China Daily Editor: Mo Hong'e

Two technicians fine-tune a robot at the stall of Xiaomi Corp at an industry expo held in Wuhan, Hubei province. (Photo by Chu Lin/ For China Daily)

Xiaomi Corp inked a deal with Microsoft Corp on Friday to deepen cooperation in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and laptops, as part of the Chinese smartphone vendor's going-global efforts this year.

The move came after Xiaomi turned in a stellar performance in overseas markets in 2017 and is an extension of the close ties between the two tech heavyweights in patents, technology as well as products.

Under the new memorandum of understanding, Microsoft will leverage its prowess in AI and cloud services to combine with Xiaomi's strength in smart devices, to create better products and help the latter in its global efforts.

The two sides are exploring ways of using Microsoft's cloud platform Azure to help Xiaomi's overseas users store data. They will also deepen cooperation in marketing and retailing channels as well as research and development to help Xiaomi's laptops enter more foreign countries.

Harry Shum, executive vice-president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, said Xiaomi is one of the most innovative Chinese companies.

"Microsoft's solid strength in AI research, its rich experience and competitive products and services will help Xiaomi bring cutting-edge technologies to every user in the global market," Shum said in a statement.

Both parties are also discussing how to integrate Microsoft's voice-activated assistant Cortana into Xiaomi's smart speakers, which can also be sold in more overseas markets.

Xiaomi is battling domestic peer Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and US tech giant Apple Inc for more market share in the global smartphone arena. In the fourth quarter of 2017, it displaced Samsung Electronics Co as the top smartphone vendor in India, the world's fastest-growing smartphone market, according to a report by market research company Canalys.

Friday's deal came after Xiaomi bought nearly 1,500 technology patents from Microsoft in 2016, which is supposed to smoothen potential legal tangles over intellectual property as it pushes beyond China.

Xiang Ligang, a telecom expert and CEO of telecom industry website cctime.com, said: "The deepened ties between Xiaomi and Microsoft will definitely facilitate the former's foray into overseas markets, but Xiaomi still needs to pour more resources into in-house research and development to achieve long-term and robust growth."

http://www.ecns.cn/2018/02-24/293360.shtml

 

[cirr]

Chinese scientists develop AI system to diagnose human diseases

2018-02-25 10:08 Xinhua Editor: Li Yan

Chinese scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system for the classification and diagnosis of treatable human diseases.

A scientific research team at Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center applied a deep-learning framework to develop a diagnostic tool for the diagnosis of pediatric pneumonia and common treatable blinding retinal diseases.

The team said the AI system had demonstrated performance comparable to that of human experts in classifying and diagnosing diseases.

The tool may ultimately aid in expediting the diagnosis and referral of these treatable conditions, thereby facilitating earlier treatment and resulting in improved clinical outcomes, according to the research team.

The research paper has been published in Cell, a scientific journal publishing research papers across a broad range of disciplines within life sciences.

http://www.ecns.cn/2018/02-25/293492.shtml

 

[onebyone]

BEIJING, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- China's artificial intelligence (AI) industry received about 180 billion yuan (28 billion U.S. dollars) of investment and financing last year, according to a recent report.

Intelligent driving, big data and data service were among the main areas of investment, according to a report released by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.

China gained 28 new AI enterprises in 2017, compared with 128 new ones in 2016, the report said, adding that the fluctuation will not affect a long-term trend of growth.

China's AI enterprises were mainly in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong last year. Beijing had the biggest number, with more than 260 AI enterprises.

The report predicted that China's AI industry would continue to grow in 2018 with breakthroughs to be made in areas such as computer vision and voice technologies.

China unveiled an AI development plan last year, vowing to bring the value of core AI industries to more than 150 billion yuan by 2020, 400 billion yuan by 2025 and one trillion yuan by 2030.

It was part of a broader plan as China strives to encourage technological innovation and to boost its manufacturing capacity up the value chain. Enditem

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-02/24/c_136997279.htm

 

[onebyone]

https://twitter.com/x/status/968400950691074049

 

[cirr]

California-based startup launches self-driving car fleet in China

2018-02-28 15:59 Xinhua Editor: Gu Liping

A self-driving tech start-up firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area on the U.S. west coast said Tuesday that it has successfully launched the first self-driving car rides on city roads to the general public in China earlier this month.

Pony.ai, an autonomous driving startup with its head office in Fremont, California, said in a statement that it has become the first company to launch the trial service on a short and well-mapped route of about 1.7 miles (about 2.7 km) in Nansha District, Guangzhou in southern China, where Pony.ai's Chinese headquarters is based.

In addition to the trial rides, Pony.ai has entered into a strategic partnership with China's second-largest carmaker, Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC Group), which is also a Fortune 500 corporation.

Founded in late 2016, Pony.ai showcased six cars in the trial rides on Feb. 2, which included four Lincoln MKZs and two GAC Chuanqi models.

Pony.ai said its autonomous driving platform has already learned to deal with specific road conditions such as road congestion, inclement weather, and driving behaviors typical of urban Chinese drivers.

During the trial riding in Guangzhou, Pony.ai's team has developed a specific software module that enables the cars to handle severe weather such as heavy rain, a technical breakthrough which has enabled Pony.ai to achieve new heights in reliability and safety, said the company.

The young startup of artificial intelligence-powered auto technology has also been testing its technology on California roads with retrofitted Lincolns.

Pony.ai, which raised 112 million U.S. dollars in Series A funding last year, is one of several companies with headquarters in Silicon Valley that are racing for an early lead in self-driving vehicles in China.

The startup was co-founded by James Peng, a former chief architect at the autonomous driving division of China's search giant Baidu, and Lou Tiancheng, who once worked for the self-driving tech department of Google and Baidu.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2018/02-28/293990.shtml

 

[cirr]

Alibaba, NTU Singapore launch joint research institute on AI technology

2018-02-28 17:03 Xinhua Editor: Gu Liping

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore) jointly launched a research institute on Wednesday by signing a Memorandum of Understanding.

It is Alibaba's first joint research institute outside China, with a pool of 50 researchers from both organizations.

The institute will seek to combine NTU's human-centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology which has been applied to areas such as health, homes and communities, with Alibaba's leading technologies including Natural Language Processing, computer vision, machine learning and cloud computing, to explore further technology breakthroughs and real-life AI solutions.

Zhang Jianfeng, Alibaba Group Chief Technology Officer, said at the ceremony that Singapore is an important market for Alibaba, as it is the company's regional base in Southeast Asia that provides e-commerce, cloud computing and payment solutions to empower customers in various industries in the region from the city-state.

He said the company, by launching its first joint research institute in Singapore, hope to work with talents in Singapore and researchers worldwide to explore technology innovation that can address common issues faced by the society at large.

"Meanwhile, we can also tap into our existing business resources in the region to magnify the impact of the technology development, making solutions affordable and accessible to all," Zhang added.

Subra Suresh, the university president, said the combination of strengths of Alibaba's AI technologies with NTU's Humanized AI technologies will create smarter, healthier and happier cities for people of all ages.

"These AI and cloud technologies will be developed and tested on the NTU Smart Campus to demonstrate the effectiveness of the solutions so that our partners can have confidence before taking them to the market in Singapore and rest of the world," he said.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2018/02-28/294010.shtml

 

[TaiShang]

https://twitter.com/x/status/968400950691074049

Great way to improve quality of life.

 

[TaiShang]

More govt services using facial recognition, AI and robot technology

By Li Ruohan Source:Global Times Published: 2018/2/28

A woman uses facial recognition technology to access a building in Beijing's Haidian district. Photo: IC

After the Spring Festival holiday, all 1,200 people who worked in a building in Beijing's Haidian district government found they could enter without showing any credentials, as their face was enough to get them inside the building.

A facial recognition system has been installed at the three entrances, and it only takes seconds for someone to pass through, Ma Xiaochuan, the system's project manager at the Beijing-based Zhonghai Investment company, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The system can also alert security guards immediately when a stranger is spotted trying to enter, said Ma.

In addition to collecting and analyzing the entrance information, the system can also help prevent cases of people borrowing or faking credentials to intrude into the building, said the manager.

The move makes Haidian the first local government to use facial recognition technology in Beijing. It is one of the technologies used for e-governance, a trend that has been on the rise in recent years across China due to the rapid development of big data and artificial intelligence.

Wider usage

While the Internet was first used as an administrative tool in the early 2000s, the trend has only peaked in the past two years, after the technology matured and proved to be safe, Zhuang Deshui, deputy director of the Research Center for Government Integrity-Building at Peking University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

In May 2017, the State Council, or China's cabinet, released a timetable for central and local governments to build e-governance platforms in a plan aimed at encouraging the use of Internet and smart technologies in government services.

By the end of August 2017, 29 provincial-level governments had launched online platforms for administrative services, said a statement from the cabinet.

Using the facial recognition technology, the public security department in East China's Fujian Province has helped return 124 missing people to their families in three months, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Xiamen in Fujian Province also began using facial recognition in its medical system at the end of 2017. Doctors could only write prescriptions after logging in to the system, which could help prevent unqualified doctors prescribing medicines, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

In Guangdong's Liwan district, two auto-service machines at the district government's service center can book and handle more than 800 administrative services including visa services and printing proof of tax-clearance, local newspaper New Express reported in January.

In November 2017, urban management and traffic police in Hefei, East China's Anhui Province, jointly implemented a pre-warning system for parking infractions. Drivers are warned by text message if they park illegally and will not be fined if they relocate within 10 minutes.

The system prevented 50 parking violations on the day it was launched, the government website shows.

The use of robots is also on the rise in local government services in regions including Shaanxi and Guizhou province, as well as Shanghai and Shenzhen.

The robots can instruct citizens on online government services and help with printing or copying ID cards and documents.

In one simulated situation, a robot used by Shenzhen railway police during the Spring Festival travel rush collected the facial information of a suspected knife attacker and quickly uploaded the information to a database, which helped local police capture the suspect.

The cost of those systems varies according to the scope of use and technology, ranging from around 50,000 yuan ($7,920) to hundreds of thousands of yuan, service providers told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Security concerns

These systems can collect and analyze information to improve the allocation of resources according to users' needs, said experts. Without feedback from users, it will be difficult to improve government services, while AI and e-government services can also help governments solve complicated problems in remote areas, Zeng Ying, a project director at Fujian Huayu Education Technology Co, told the Global Times.

However, the technologies are not being widely applied due to security concerns, and some local officials are also refusing to delegate their power, said Zhuang.

Police in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu Province, found in a one-month public opinion survey that nearly half of those polled thought facial recognition systems were unsafe, as they believed people could access their information using their photos.

Of the complaints received, 41 percent were about the recognition service not functioning well in crowded or dark situations, while 31 complained about low recognition speed, according to the investigation released on the Nanjing government website.

To address the safety concerns, the Cyberspace Administration of China will take the leading role in protecting private information collected in government systems and local governments will be responsible for data security when the information is collected, exchanged and used, according to a central government statement.

 

[cirr]

China issues three road test licenses to smart car makers

2018-03-02 08:10 Xinhua Editor: Wang Fan

China on Thursday issued the country's first three road test licenses to smart car makers, making road tests of autopilot vehicles legal.

Shanghai-based SAIC Motor received two of the licenses and the electric vehicle startup Nio obtained the other one.

The licenses allow the operators to use a 5.6-km public road in Jiading District of Shanghai for testing smart cars.

Huang Ou, deputy director of the Shanghai Commission of Economy and Information Technology, said the test road was designated based on a third-party appraisal.

"Shanghai will open more roads for testing smart cars," said Huang.

The license came after Baidu boss Robin Li test drove the company's autonomous vehicle on Beijing's open roads in July last year, causing controversy as there were no rules regarding such a test.

Zhang Cheng, general manager of the foresight technology division of SAIC Motor, said road tests on public roads can gather useful data on real traffic conditions for testing autonomous driving functions of smart cars.

Cao Guangyi, political commissar of the Shanghai traffic police, said police would pursue the responsibility of test drivers in cases of road accidents involving smart cars under road tests.

Shanghai on Thursday issued a regulation on road tests of smart cars, and vowed to push ahead the application and commercialization of smart cars with AI technology and Internet-linked functions.

Lu Zufang, Jiading District official, said the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle (Shanghai) Pilot Zone in Jiading, which has become a world-class venue for testing smart cars, has built 200 test settings for various driving situations.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2018/03-01/294197.shtml

 

[cirr]

AI development needs global cooperation, not China-phobia

2018-03-02 16:47 Xinhua Editor: Gu Liping

China is gaining momentum in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, which has been translating its huge market size into commercialized innovations. This is a boon instead of a threat.

The cry-wolf alarms that America is losing a race for supremacy in the AI industry by comparing China's catching-up to America's Sputnik panic in the late 1950s, have, in a sense, misinterpreted or misrepresented the true AI story.

A typical misinterpretation goes to the "global tech cold war," which was put forward by Eurasia Group, a New York-headquartered think tank, arguing that the winner in AI and super-computing between the United States and China will dominate the coming decades, both economically and geopolitically.

This outlook, tinged with a sense of crisis, does cite some solid evidences: two countries are competing to make tech breakthroughs, and in some areas, running neck and neck.

It is echoed by CBInsight's report released in February. According to the New York-based venture capital consultancy, China's AI startups took 48 percent of all dollars going to AI startups globally in 2017, surpassing the United States for the first time for global deal share.

China's catching up is not a thing that America is accustomed to, hence leading to two opposite reactions: belittling it or demonizing it. However, both miss the point.

First of all, China's AI sector is not a copycat. Chinese AI company iFlytek, specializing in speech recognition, launched its Chinese-English translation machine at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in January, causing quite an uproar.

The Chinese company has ranked top in a reading comprehension dataset created by Stanford University. It shows that the wit of iFlytek platform is slightly slower than human performance, but smarter than Microsoft Research Asia ranking second.

But this is not a winner-take-all game. The artificial intelligence involves a progressive learning that requires continuous flow of AI-ready data. It is open sourced and will become stronger with more players.

China's advantages in artificial intelligence lie in its huge size of internet users: over 770 million in 2017, which make up an ideal trainer database for any new algorithm. Algorithm is deemed as a crucial element in the new area, together with AI chips and massive data.

A recent medical advance of AI-based screening for eye diseases and pneumonia, published in the journal of Cell last week, has been jointly made by scientists of University of California San Diego and China's Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center.

It should be noted that thousands of pneumonia X-ray images used in the research came from Guangzhou and about 200,000 optical coherence tomography images came from Beijing and Shanghai. Obviously, the therapeutic AI platform will provide substantial benefits to patients in both countries.

Liu Qingfeng, iFlyTek's CEO, told Xinhua at CES that massive data sets, algorithms and professionals are a must-have combination for AI, which "requires global cooperation" and "no company can play hegemony."

On Wednesday, Chinese tech startup SenseTime Co. became the first company to join Massachusetts Institute of Technology's ambitious program to open AI's black box or how AI thinks.

Realistically, this sector has something to do with competition and more with cooperation, which allows for more than one winner.

http://www.ecns.cn/2018/03-02/294359.shtml