Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, mentioned a very cutting-edge idea: the establishment of a “China Brain” project to promote the leapfrog development of artificial intelligence and seize the commanding heights of a new round of technological revolution.
“This project is to be a about the infrastructure of artificial intelligence, the corresponding large-scale services focus was set up, and open to the scientific research institutions, private companies, state-owned enterprises, entrepreneurs and other social aspects, let people try to speech recognition on this platform, visual recognition and natural language understanding, intelligent robot, etc.” As a representative of the frontier technology in the 21st century, artificial intelligence may be as important as the Apollo moon landing, human gene project and the global information revolution, which will have a profound impact on the economy and society of mankind.
1. The Importance of Artificial Intelligence — the next technological revolution
The importance of AI will first show up in the economic field, bringing innovation and change to almost every industry. A deloitte DUP report published last year identified eight sectors of the economy that could be affected by AI, including banking, where automated fraud detection systems use machine learning to identify patterns of behaviour that indicate fraudulent payment actions; With the help of voice recognition technology can automatically complete the telephone customer service; Voice recognition verifies the identity of the caller.
In health care, half of all U.S. hospitals use automated voice recognition to help doctors transcribe orders automatically, and the use is growing rapidly. Machine vision systems automate the analysis of mammograms and other medical effects; IBM’s Watson uses natural language processing to read and understand reams of medical literature, automated diagnosis through automated hypothesis generation, and machine learning to improve accuracy.
In the life sciences, machine learning systems are used to predict cause-and-effect relationships between biological data and compound activity, helping pharmaceutical companies identify the most promising drugs. In addition, it also includes the media and entertainment industry, the public sector, etc. According to Mehrdad Fatourechi, CTO of BroadbandTV, natural language processing and machine translation in ARTIFICIAL intelligence will revolutionize the travel and communications industries. Machine learning and augmented reality will revolutionize advertising, and so on.
According to the definition of “realizing all the tasks that cannot be realized without human intelligence”, artificial intelligence is not only of positive impact on relevant industries and fields, but also of enhancement and extension of human intelligence.
Is an important difference between humans and machines, the former is consciousness, try and learning ability, and the research of artificial intelligence is trying to make machines have these qualities, for example, deep learning is inspired by the mechanism of human brain neural network operation, and the image recognition technology based on deep learning can already be in a very large human images in the collection to identify one person This collection will be far beyond human capacity to process.
Therefore, with the development of artificial intelligence, it will not only bring more intelligent automatic diagnosis and real-time logistics decision support and other practical applications, but also a new vision to understand the world, better help human decision-making. We’ll be able to outsource more work to machines, which will become our second brains. Therefore, AI is of equal importance to society and to the country.
2. Layout of developed countries
The United States, the European Union and other developed countries have already begun to give key support to the field of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, and some of their relevant departments are also actively cooperating with technology companies. Here are a few examples from which we may learn some lessons.
1) European Union Human Brain Project
The European Brain Project was selected in 2013 as one of the EU’s flagship technologies for the Future and received 1 billion euros in funding, making it the most important human brain research project in the world. The project aims to build a new and revolutionary set of information and communication technologies based on neuroscience.
Build a chip that mimics the function of neurons and then use that chip to build a supercomputer. HBP’s high-performance computing system, neuromorphic computing system and neurorobot platform can be used to develop emerging computing technologies and applications. With the help of neuromorphic computing system and neurorobot platform, researchers can create software prototypes with great potential for market applications.
These prototypes include home robots, manufacturing robots and service robots with powerful data mining, maneuvering control, video processing and imaging, and information communication capabilities.
2) Robots from Google and DARPA
Boston Dynamics, which Google acquired in late 2013, has long had close ties to DARPA, winning a $10.9 million contract in 2012 to develop humanoid robots.
In 2013, Boston Dynamics developed DARPA’s “Big Dog” robot, which is quieter and more bulletproof, and plans to begin participating in military exercises in 2015 to reduce risk to combat personnel.
Earlier this year, Boston Dynamics unveiled the Spot robot, which uses electrical and hydraulic brakes to work indoors and outdoors, and sensors in its head to help it navigate and navigate rough terrain.
Given that the robot Big Dog has already been used by the U.S. military for military training on difficult terrain, Spot’s potential for military use is obvious.
3)IBM and DARPA’s brain-like chips
In November 2008, The defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics(SyNAPSE) program. During the first phase of SyNAPSE, DARPA awarded $4.9 million to IBM and the five universities working with it.
In August 2014, IBM relaunched SyNAPSE’s latest effort, TrueNorth, a chip that mimics the human brain. The new chip has reached mass production requirements compared to its predecessor, and has 1 million “neuron” cores, 256 million “synaptic” cores, and 4,096 “synaptic” cores. With just 70 milliwatts of power, the chip mimics the way the human brain works, making it better at pattern recognition and, with low power consumption, far beyond traditional computing architectures in terms of cognitive computing.
Because the new SyNAPSE chip could revolutionize computing, IBM developed a new programming language to work with it. IBM also launched SyNAPSE University’s education program, which received $53 million in funding from DARpa.
4)NASA and Singularity University
Singularity University is a university whose mission is to educate, encourage, and teach leaders in the exponential application of technology to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges. Google, Cisco, Nokia and Genentech have been partners with the university since its inception in 2009.
Other funders include Autodesk, Fauffman Fund and ePlanet Capital. The university is located at NASA’s Ames Research Center, which is funded by NASA. Today, Singularity University has spawned a number of AI projects, including the Matternet drone.
5)DARPA
The oft-mentioned Agency for Advanced Research in Defense (DARPA) is itself a state department focused on cutting-edge innovation and has pioneered much of the work in artificial intelligence, such as Siri, which was born out of a $150 million DARPA investment. The five-year-old CALO(Cognitive Assistant That Learns and Organizes) project is the first AI project to achieve large-scale industrial application in the US.
DARPA is currently working on a new project called “CwC” (Communicating with Computers), which aims to break down the language barrier between humans and machines, allowing computers to express themselves in the same way humans do by using spoken words, facial expressions and gestures.
In addition, there are also the aforementioned brain-like chip with IBM, the human Avatar project and many other projects related to ARTIFICIAL intelligence.
DARPA operates in a research outsourcing mode. Instead of doing research itself, DARPA allocates its annual research funds to university laboratories, technology companies and so on for all kinds of cutting-edge research. Judging from DARPA’s great achievements over the years, this mechanism of open cooperation at the national level seems to be effective, which also coincides with the artificial intelligence platform and open resources mentioned by Li.
3. Opportunities for China’s brain
It must be admitted that ARTIFICIAL intelligence will have a positive impact on the economic field and the whole society, and developed countries have carried out a positive layout in this area and made remarkable achievements, but at the same time, there are some problems, for example, the European Union’s brain project and IBM’s brain-like chip have been criticized by Yann Lecun, head of Artificial intelligence at Facebook.
He said: “fundamentally speaking, the Human Brain Project (the Human Brain Project) in a large part is based on the idea that we should build a simulated neurons function of the chip, the closer the better, then chips used to build the super computer, when we use some kind of learning rules to open it, artificial intelligence. I think it’s nonsense.” But in fact, we need “thinking machines”, not necessarily “machines that can think like a human brain”.
Deep learning in ARTIFICIAL intelligence empowers machines to learn by themselves from data. Baidu, Google, Facebook and other technology giants have also achieved the landing of ARTIFICIAL intelligence through deep learning, providing users with better products and services and achieving explosive growth in technological improvement.
Giiso, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, Giiso’s research and development products include editing robots, writing robots and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.
“Infrastructure” of artificial intelligence in the future will focus on establishing the corresponding mass service, open to scientific research institutions, private companies, state-owned enterprises, entrepreneurs and other social aspects, it involves intelligent human-computer interaction, analysis and prediction of large data, automatic driving, intelligent medical diagnosis, intelligent unmanned aircraft, important research fields such as military and civilian robot technology, It will continue to improve the technical level of speech recognition, visual recognition, natural language understanding and intelligent robots, and thus reflect the competitiveness of the national level.
What happens when a technology project at an imaginative level succeeds? Just look at the “Apollo Moon Landing program” of the United States, which led to the growth and innovation of a large number of enterprises, and the ARPAnet of the U.S. military DARPA, which derived the Internet.
More importantly, this paradigm of “government taking a big project to build a science and technology infrastructure and then opening it up to the whole society who wants to participate in it” has evolved into a new economic development paradigm of “deep cooperation and mutual promotion between government and technology enterprises”. The contribution to China’s economy will be far more than the harvest of a number of star science and technology enterprises and achievements, but will be a driving force for the transformation of the entire economy and society.
Let’s look forward to a future transformed by cutting-edge technology and technology companies.