AI to reserve business potential in Chinese market

Photo taken on August 12, 2016 shows the China Computer Federation Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit (CCF-GAIR) held in Shenzhen. [Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn]

Artificial intelligence, or AI - recognized as an international "geeky" buzzword - once again drew the Chinese media's attention on Friday at the ongoing Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit held in Shenzhen.

Zhang Hongjiang, chief executive of Kingsoft, told China Daily the market' s potential and bonus in the country would continue in coming years, while more capital would be expected to flow into the AI sector, despite over-heated investments.

"Minorities' business failure or homogeneity competition hit on the market somehow reveal the technology's strong forward momentum," Zhang said.

"The innovation and leaping development reserve in China's mobile internet sector have generated attentions from both western media outlets and overseas investors, such as the latest tech magazine Wired's story about Xiaomi and New York Times' WeChat coverage."

According to Zhang, algorithms, big data and computing are the three major, but basic, technologies that can enable the implementation of AI.

Progress achieved in technology such as machine learning, which is associated with AI, reflects the rapid growth of the country's AI industry.

An companion AI robot named Boyan dodo is on display during the China Computer Federation Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit (CCF-GAIR) held on August 12, 2016 in Shenzhen. [Liu Zheng/chinadaily.com.cn]

"The technology gap between China and some of the industry leaders in the field, such as the US, witnessed narrow down in recent years as Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Transfer Learning contained in the sector have made considerable progress and get obviously improved," said Yang Qiang, chair professor and head of the department of computer science and engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

"Number of Chinese writers' academic research essays published at the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) increased sharply in the past recent years."

Kingsoft's Zhang said: "US tech pioneers such as Microsoft and Google have been played a leading role in developing AI's algorithms in the past decades while domestic late-comers made their every efforts to catch up the trend in recent years."

"Voice interaction and facial recognition are two major implementations of AI that applied by many Chinese companies at present."

According to analysis company iResearch, the market scale of AI in China reached about 1.2 billion yuan last year, and it is expected to grow 50 percent in the next five years. The company estimated that by 2020, the market size would reach 9.1 billion yuan.

Michael Wooldridge, head of department of computer science of Hertford College, University of Oxford, delivers a keynote speech named "Routes to AI" during the China Computer Federation Global Artificial Intelligence & Robotics Summit (CCF-GAIR) held on August 12, 2016 in Shenzhen. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"More individuality will be introduced to machine learning and AI will be widely used in finance sector," Yang said.

"The industry will seen a develop trend that face to radicalized directions," said Zhou, "Varieties of sectors such as autonomous driving will welcome a promising future."

The conference is being hosted by the China Computer Federation (CCF) and was organized by the domestic technology website leiphone.com.

Discussion topics include AI, robots, autonomous driving and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which will be covered during a two-day meeting consisting of keynote speeches and panel discussions.

Three academics from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and professors from both China and overseas industry-leading universities, have been invited to participate at the conference.

According to the organizer, more than 2,000 people are expected to visit the event.