China's Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology

[dy1022]

 

[Jlaw]

created in America

 

[cirr]

China drone makers receive more investments than U.S. counterparts

2016-05-13 10:25

People's Daily Online Editor: Wang Fan

DJI drone is sold in an apple store in Shenzhen. (File Photo)

China has more unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufacturers than the U.S., and Chinese drone companies receive more investment capital than U.S. companies, according to an iResearch report.

Presently, there are over 500 UAV companies around the world, and competition between suppliers is only intensifying. Fewer than 50 companies receive financing, and only four are valued at more than $1 billion. Two of the companies are publically listed.

Since 2015, the number Chinese UAV companies that receive financing has surged, and the amount of the investments has increased rapidly as well. In the U.S., since 2012, UAV companies have maintained a steady growth rate. Chinese UAV companies tend to focus mainly on development and manufacturing, while U.S. companies have more innovation in their service.

The report predicts that by 2025, China aerial UAV market will be worth over $75 billion, including $30 billion for aerial shooting, $20 billion for agriculture, forestry and plant protection, $15 billion for the security industry and $5 billion for electrical inspections.

The report also says that the civilian UAV market is growing. Chinese drone manufacturer DJI Technology Co. dominated China's online drone sales with a market share of 77.4 percent in January and February 2016.

http://www.ecns.cn/business/2016/05-13/210366.shtml

China's first goods transporting drone completes maiden flight

2016-05-13 13:22

People's Daily Online Editor: Wang Fan

(Photo/PLA Daily Weibo)

China's first mid-long range emergency supplies transporting drone successfully completed its maiden flight on Tuesday.

The fixed-wing drone can carry 15 kilograms of goods on flight of up to 80 kilometers and make accurate delivery within a range of 15 meters, marking a breakthrough in terms of mileage, load, and short distance of take-off and landing compared with other drones available at the moment.

http://www.ecns.cn/2016/05-13/210395.shtml

 

[AndrewJin]

The report predicts that by 2025, China aerial UAV market will be worth over $75 billion, including $30 billion for aerial shooting, $20 billion for agriculture, forestry and plant protection, $15 billion for the security industry and $5 billion for electrical inspections.

That's a huge market!
DJI and likes can really make a fortune in China.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

http://gethover.com/

 

[BoQ77]

It discovered a rare illness that doctors had missed.

Jon Fingas , @jonfingas
08.07.16 in Medicine

IBM's Watson has done everything from winning at Jeopardy to cooking exotic meals, but it appears to have accomplished its greatest feat yet: saving a life. University of Tokyo doctors report that the artificial intelligence diagnosed a 60-year-old woman's rare form of leukemia that had been incorrectly identified months earlier. The analytical machine took just 10 minutes to compare the patient's genetic changes with a database of 20 million cancer research papers, delivering an accurate diagnosis and leading to proper treatment that had proven elusive. Watson has also identified another rare form of leukemia in another patient, the university says.

It'll likely take a long while before Watson and other AI systems are regularly providing advice at hospitals, and it won't be all that useful in situations without readily comparable data. We've asked the school for more details of what happened. However, the diagnoses show just how useful the technology could be in the medical world. Human doctors wouldn't have to spend ages sifting through research to identify an obscure disease, or hope that another hospital can offer insights -- they'd just plug in the right data and start the healing process.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Watson using voice recognition as the input source playing Jeopardy against humans.

 

[S10]

Computers are starting to replace jobs that not only replace simple manual labor, but highly complex and sophisticated technical fields too. We as a society need to start brainstorming strategies to cope with this trend.

What happens when a significant portion of the population becomes unemployed due to automation? We will still be able to mass produce goods, but who has the money to purchase those goods/services without an income source?

 

[cirr]

China says 'aye' to AI

China Daily, September 29, 2016

Every year, about 9 million students in China sit for the gaokao, the national college entrance test. Intensive preparations for a year mark the run-up to the annual test, arguably the world's toughest, that determines which university a student will go to eventually.

In four years, all this will likely change. Not just students, even robots, powered by artificial intelligence, may ace the test.

Such is the pervasiveness of the technology that large investments are pouring into AI firms in China.

iFlytek Co Ltd, a Shenzhen-listed AI company, is developing a robot that will seek to beat 80 percent of Chinese students and become eligible, theoretically, for admission into a top-level university in 2020.

Hu Yu, the rotating president of iFlytek, said the scholarly robot project, unveiled in December, is making brisk progress.

"Our artificial intelligence system enables robots to accomplish tasks like reading and comprehension as intelligently as a 6-year-old," Hu said.

Students watch intelligent robots developed by a Beijing company for use in education, elderly care, household chores and security purposes. [Photo provided to China Daily]

For example, when a computer "reads" out a story about a duck catching fish, with some words removed and others replaced with names of other animals like pig and cow, the scholarly robot can fill in the blanks with the right words.

It can also recognize that the main character of the story is a duck, not a pig.

iFlytek's efforts are part of a broader AI wave sweeping China. Since supercomputer AlphaGo defeated a world champion in the ancient strategy game Go earlier this year, AI has become one of the most popular fields for investments.

"This boom in AI is chiefly driven by advances in big data technology," said Luo Jun, CEO of the Asian Manufacturing Association.

"The massive consumer base and 650 million internet users in China, which means a huge volume of online data, presents the most promising opportunities for local enterprises to compete head to head with international giants."

Baidu Inc, the Chinese internet search giant that has obtained a permit to test its self-driving cars in California earlier this month, said it would double down on its bet on a venture capital firm focusing on AI. Its initial investment fund will be $200 million.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd are also eyeing the sector. Both of them have cloud computing units. They have also invested in AI startups.

For its part, iFlytek has set up a 1-billion-yuan investment fund, to boost the overseas presence of its voice-recognition technology.

According to a report by Beijing-based research firm iResearch Consulting Group, there are roughly 100 AI startups in China. As of December 2015, 65 of them had received 2.9 billion yuan ($434 million) from venture capitalists.

Fueling the trend is the Chinese government's three-year initiative to discover and nurture potential global leaders in AI through financial support. Priority has been accorded to application of cutting-edge technologies in smart home appliances, self-driving vehicles, robots and security products.

"By 2025, most consumer electronics products will be AI-enabled, and have 'eyes' and 'brains' to interact with the environment and make decisions," Yu Kai, CEO and founder of Horizon Robotics, a Beijing-based startup focused on building chips to power AI, said at a conference earlier this year.

The firm, set up by the former Baidu veteran, has raised an undisclosed amount of investment from Yuri Milner, the well-known Russian investor behind internet giants such as Facebook Inc and Alibaba.

Zhao Ziming, an analyst at Beijing-based internet consultancy Analysys, said though AI is still nascent, Chinese firms have demonstrated strong capabilities in voice- and image-recognition technologies.

iFlytek, for instance, prevailed in the 2016 Winograd Schema Challenge, a well-recognized global competition to test machine intelligence.

"But the relatively poor technology infrastructure among Chinese traditional industries may be an obstacle for rapid application of AI. It is important to remain sober-minded amid the tide," Zhao said.

http://www.china.org.cn/business/2016-09/29/content_39398546.htm

 

[onebyone]

Humanity may still be years if not decades away from producing sentient artificial intelligence. But with the rise of machine-learning services in our smartphones and other devices, one type of narrow, specialized AI has become all the rage. And the research on this branch of AI is only accelerating.

In fact, as more industries and policymakers awaken to the benefits of machine learning, two countries appear to be pulling away in the research race. The results will probably have significant implications for the future of AI.

a new strategic plan aimed at spurring U.S. development of artificial intelligence. What's striking about it is that although the United States was an early leader on deep-learning research, China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject. The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted.


The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart below narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.

(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)
Compared with other countries, the United States and China are spending tremendous research attention on deep learning. But, according to the White House, the United States is not investing nearly enough in basic research.

“Current levels of R&D spending are half to one-quarter of the level of R&D investment that would produce the optimal level of economic growth,” a companion report published this week by the Obama administration finds.

The government is pushing for a major role for itself in AI research, and here's why: Becoming a leader in artificial-intelligence research and development puts the United States in a better position to establish global norms on how AI should be used safely. When AI stands to transform virtually everything including labor, the environment, and the future of warfare and cyberconflict, the United States could be put at a disadvantage if other countries, such as China, get to dictate terms instead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news.../13/china-has-now-eclipsed-us-in-ai-research/

 

[cirr]

Where is that Indian guy @Bussard Ramjet?

Chinese AI Startup TuSimple Breaks Ten Records in Autonomous-driving Technology

Oct 12, 2016, 07:00 ET

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- TuSimple, a Chinese computer vision and artificial intelligence startup, announced that it ranked No. 1 in KITTI and Cityscapes, the most influential public leaderboard in autonomous driving.

For KITTI, TuSimple swept three records in object detection, two in object tracking and four in road segmentation. In total, TuSimple achieved world-leading results in 10 records.

KITTI/CityScapes dataset has been a popular arena for many years. Its players include many world-class research institutes, such as Baidu, Samsung, NVidia, and NEC, and top universities, such as Stanford, andUniversity of California.

An authoritative public benchmark dataset is important to evaluate the technical competence of a team. The KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite, established by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, is the world's first and largest benchmark for vision based autonomous driving. KITTI includes real images collected from a variety of road scenes, from urban streets to country roads to highways. Each image contains a sophisticated scenario involving, for instance, a crowded vehicle and pedestrians, with various levels of occlusion.

KITTI object detection includes vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle detection. KITTI target tracking includes vehicle and pedestrian tracking. KITTI road segmentation includes four individual scenarios, including urban unmarked, urban marked, urban multiple marked and the average of former named urban road.

TuSimple swept KITTI's nine individual tests, ranking first in the world for all of them, while other well-known institutes had previously had only one or two individual top ranks.

Cityscapes Dataset is published by Mercedes-Benz and provides a segmentation data set in anonymous driving. It is used to evaluate algorithms' performance of semantic understanding in an urban setting. Cityscapes have 50 cities with different scenes, backgrounds and seasons. It has 5,000 fine annotation images, 20,000 roughly annotation images and 30 class objects.

Cityscapes benchmark has two subsets: fine and coarse. The former provides 5,000 very detailed, pixel-level labeling and the latter provides an extra 20,000 coarse level labeling. TuSimple's algorithm triumphed under each sets of criteria.

In addition to TuSimple's success in the self-driving benchmark for KITTI and Cityscapes, TuSimple also achieved first place in facial landmark localization benchmark, 300W and AFLW by a landslide. This technique is mainly used for driver monitoring systems and positioning driver facial landmarks to detect fatigue or distracted driving.

The same technologies have been used in TuSimple's product and demo.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...-autonomous-driving-technology-300343337.html

 

[onebyone]

Where is that Indian guy @Bussard Ramjet?

Chinese AI Startup TuSimple Breaks Ten Records in Autonomous-driving Technology

Oct 12, 2016, 07:00 ET

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 12, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- TuSimple, a Chinese computer vision and artificial intelligence startup, announced that it ranked No. 1 in KITTI and Cityscapes, the most influential public leaderboard in autonomous driving.

For KITTI, TuSimple swept three records in object detection, two in object tracking and four in road segmentation. In total, TuSimple achieved world-leading results in 10 records.

KITTI/CityScapes dataset has been a popular arena for many years. Its players include many world-class research institutes, such as Baidu, Samsung, NVidia, and NEC, and top universities, such as Stanford, andUniversity of California.

An authoritative public benchmark dataset is important to evaluate the technical competence of a team. The KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite, established by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, is the world's first and largest benchmark for vision based autonomous driving. KITTI includes real images collected from a variety of road scenes, from urban streets to country roads to highways. Each image contains a sophisticated scenario involving, for instance, a crowded vehicle and pedestrians, with various levels of occlusion.

KITTI object detection includes vehicle, pedestrian and bicycle detection. KITTI target tracking includes vehicle and pedestrian tracking. KITTI road segmentation includes four individual scenarios, including urban unmarked, urban marked, urban multiple marked and the average of former named urban road.

TuSimple swept KITTI's nine individual tests, ranking first in the world for all of them, while other well-known institutes had previously had only one or two individual top ranks.

Cityscapes Dataset is published by Mercedes-Benz and provides a segmentation data set in anonymous driving. It is used to evaluate algorithms' performance of semantic understanding in an urban setting. Cityscapes have 50 cities with different scenes, backgrounds and seasons. It has 5,000 fine annotation images, 20,000 roughly annotation images and 30 class objects.

Cityscapes benchmark has two subsets: fine and coarse. The former provides 5,000 very detailed, pixel-level labeling and the latter provides an extra 20,000 coarse level labeling. TuSimple's algorithm triumphed under each sets of criteria.

In addition to TuSimple's success in the self-driving benchmark for KITTI and Cityscapes, TuSimple also achieved first place in facial landmark localization benchmark, 300W and AFLW by a landslide. This technique is mainly used for driver monitoring systems and positioning driver facial landmarks to detect fatigue or distracted driving.

The same technologies have been used in TuSimple's product and demo.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...-autonomous-driving-technology-300343337.html

 

[GS Zhou]

We are in the status of "Sustainable Collapse"!!
(可持续性崩溃，中或最输)

 

[Bussard Ramjet]

Humanity may still be years if not decades away from producing sentient artificial intelligence. But with the rise of machine-learning services in our smartphones and other devices, one type of narrow, specialized AI has become all the rage. And the research on this branch of AI is only accelerating.

In fact, as more industries and policymakers awaken to the benefits of machine learning, two countries appear to be pulling away in the research race. The results will probably have significant implications for the future of AI.

a new strategic plan aimed at spurring U.S. development of artificial intelligence. What's striking about it is that although the United States was an early leader on deep-learning research, China has effectively eclipsed it in terms of the number of papers published annually on the subject. The rate of increase is remarkably steep, reflecting how quickly China's research priorities have shifted.


The quality of China's research is also striking. The chart below narrows the research to include only those papers that were cited at least once by other researchers, an indication that the papers were influential in the field.

(Office of Science and Technology Policy/The White House)
Compared with other countries, the United States and China are spending tremendous research attention on deep learning. But, according to the White House, the United States is not investing nearly enough in basic research.

“Current levels of R&D spending are half to one-quarter of the level of R&D investment that would produce the optimal level of economic growth,” a companion report published this week by the Obama administration finds.

The government is pushing for a major role for itself in AI research, and here's why: Becoming a leader in artificial-intelligence research and development puts the United States in a better position to establish global norms on how AI should be used safely. When AI stands to transform virtually everything including labor, the environment, and the future of warfare and cyberconflict, the United States could be put at a disadvantage if other countries, such as China, get to dictate terms instead.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news.../13/china-has-now-eclipsed-us-in-ai-research/

This is research based on numbers, not quality. Both the graphs here signify numbers.

It would have been better if we would have compared papers by their total citations.

 

[GCTom]

Publishing research paper is one thing, publishing quality research paper is another thing, and publishing quality, innovative, and ground breaking research paper is another big thing.

While it is somewhat an indication that China is publishing good amount of research papers on AI, but we have not seen any groundbreaking products came out of China results of these.

Currently I doubt China's research on AI is at the same level and sophistication as the Americans, maybe in the future China will catch up.