2021 World Conference On Artificial Intelligence Opens: "Man Machine And Object" Accelerate Integration

      The annual World Conference on artificial intelligence has begun in July. Compared with the low-key held online in 2020, this year's venue, the Shanghai World Expo Center, has become more and more lively. Both the participating enterprises and the number of visitors have recovered significantly. At the same time, both the government and academia have put forward rational suggestions for the industry.

In his speech at the opening ceremony on July 8, Li Qiang, Secretary of the Shanghai municipal Party committee, pointed out that artificial intelligence is realizing technological evolution and cutting-edge breakthrough at an unprecedented speed. It is linking all things and connecting the world with an unprecedented breadth. It is empowering all industries and the world with unprecedented depth, profoundly changing the present and shaping the future, Human beings are entering an era of intelligent interconnection of all things with the triple integration of "man-machine and object".

According to the "2020 global AI innovation index report" released during the conference, at present, the overall development level of artificial intelligence in China has ranked among the top in the world, second only to the United States. The comprehensive score of China's AI innovation index rose from the third in 2019 to the second in 2020. It is also the only developing country to enter the top ten of AI innovation index. In terms of specific indicators, China performs well in terms of basic support, innovation resources and environment, scientific and technological research and development, industry and application, and the four first-class indicators all rank in the top ten.

However, the rapid development of the industry also faces constraints. In his speech, Hu houkun, chairman in office of Huawei, pointed out that the current bottleneck in the AI industry is not the demand for technology and application, but the efficiency of development. Only when the foundation is firmly laid, the root technology is deeply rooted, and the application innovation runs fast, can there be a towering tree of artificial intelligence industry and the sustainable prosperity of ecology.

AI enabled urban digital transformation

At present, AI is in the key period of industry scale application and promotion, but more often it is silent. A few days ago, Shanghai launched the "always follow the party" Huangpu River theme light and shadow show, which has swept the circle of friends of the people of the whole country. Behind a series of cheers, it is inseparable from the blessing of AI.

According to official statistics, a total of 3.4 million people arrived at the scene in five days from June 30 to July 4, with an instantaneous peak of 117000. During this period, an average of 700000 people passed by the Nanjing building at the intersection of Henan Road and Nanjing every night. This century old building is a typical small pilot project of scientific and technological governance. At present, nearly 100 security incidents such as window opening, smoking and fire passage occupation have been detected in Nanjing building. More than one million pieces of data have been accumulated. It has experienced many tests of large passenger flow, such as may day, Dragon Boat Festival and the Centennial birthday of the party.

"In this guarantee, we once again see the important role of" one network unified management ". Relevant persons in charge take charge of commanding in the city's urban transportation center every day. The public security, city appearance, meteorology, rail transit, electric power and other departments cooperate with each other. Some subordinate areas such as Huangpu District, Pudong New Area and Hongkou District also give full support, which ensures the smooth progress of the film viewing. " Xu Huili, deputy director of the general office of the Shanghai Municipal People's government and director of the Shanghai urban operation and management center, disclosed to the 21st century economic report and other media that the minimum management unit not only creates a model for the governance of megacities, but also focuses more management power on the granularity around the fine relationship, so that the masses have a deeper feeling.

Among them, dynamic data and mobile management behavior are inseparable from the support of artificial intelligence technology. Firstly, based on the urban agent reference architecture, it integrates Huawei cloud, big data, AI, edge computing, 5g and other advanced technologies. At the same time, through the construction of a unified digital governance base, the massive data of various management units are gathered, and more than ten types of new data, such as housing, real population, perception, AI, hydropower, 12345 hotline, passenger flow and so on, are comprehensively used to realize the point to area management unit.

"Take the Shanghai 12345 hotline as an example. The response speed of this hotline is very fast, and it can answer a lot of questions. This is because the hotline system has introduced artificial intelligence technology since last year, which uses functions such as automatic dispatch, semantic recognition, and even emotional perception. Thanks to these technologies, the service speed of the whole hotline has been accelerated. In the past, it took a few minutes to send a single order, but now it takes a few seconds. During the outbreak of the epidemic last year, Shanghai 12345 hotline handled more than 600000 individual appeals per month on average. Without this improvement in efficiency, it is totally unthinkable. " Hu houkun further introduced that in addition to improving the efficiency, the hotline system has become more and more intelligent, and can even take the initiative to warn risk matters, such as where the water pipe will burst after the cold wave comes. It will make prediction in advance, so that the city management department can make a plan and deal with it quickly.

Viktor Mayer Sch ü nberger, the father of big data and a professor of Internet Governance and regulation at Oxford University's School of network, said that the core of smart city is not a specific technology or data infrastructure, but better decision-making. The basis of smart city is rich and diverse data, and it needs more than technological progress, Innovation and progress in organization and mechanism are more needed“ The concept of smart city can not only be applied to big cities and first tier cities. To make a real impact, the concept of smart city must and especially apply to small cities. However, due to the limited resources of small cities and limited implementation experience, this has become a challenge. "

Scene accelerates penetration into the industry

The Shanghai 12345 hotline is just one example of the changes AI has brought. On the one hand, artificial intelligence is an important driving force of urban digital transformation; On the other hand, Shanghai, a mega city, is also the largest application scenario. In the process of transformation, the transformation of economy, life and governance digitalization provides more opportunities for AI technology and industrial development.

At present, AI has changed from a cloud in the sky to rain in the ground, and is reshaping all aspects of economic activities such as production, distribution, exchange and consumption. The reporter of 21st century economic report saw near the world expo center that in the shopping mall next to the Expo source, it was no longer the etiquette lady who warmly said "welcome", but the robot guiding the reception. In the security inspection center of the venue, the infrared temperature measurement and epidemic prevention robot silently monitors the body temperature of the participants; In the exhibition hall, a variety of self driving vehicles emerge in endlessly, and the massage robot released by Uber also attracts many visitors to experience.

At the hehe information exhibition stand, intelligent character recognition technology that can "read" oracle bone inscriptions is displayed. Nowadays, most oracle bone inscriptions appear in the form of pictures in publications, which brings difficulties to text retrieval.

After the oracle bone inscriptions with rich images are engraved on the tortoise shells, and then rearranged and combined, the hot Internet words such as single dog, Bai Fumei, buy it and buy it can also be identified one by one“ The difficulties of oracle bone inscriptions recognition lie in the serious deformity of oracle bones, the difficulty of obtaining materials and the low clarity of rubbings, which need to be solved by technology. For example, there are few sample materials. From the technical level, we need to solve the problem of less sample training. " In an interview with the 21st century economic report reporter, the person in charge of Hehe information technology said that at present, it is mainly preliminary research and will cooperate with relevant archaeological units in the future.

These applications in image recognition, medical treatment, transportation, security and other fields have effectively changed people's lives. Sun Zhengyi, chairman and CEO of Softbank group, pointed out that 98% of global GDP structure will be transformed with the application of artificial intelligence“ In the process of information revolution, we especially support the development and transformation of artificial intelligence. Looking back on the past, the Internet has brought fundamental changes to two industries, one is advertising, the other is the retail industry affected by e-commerce. In the future, transportation, medical treatment, finance, teaching and other industries will usher in transformation with the application of artificial intelligence. "

But he further said that more than 90% or even 95% of the companies invested by Softbank's vision fund have not yet achieved profits or even are still losing money.

Improve development efficiency

Compared with the Artificial Intelligence Conference three years ago, this conference obviously has more voices from hardware manufacturers. At the same time, there are also challenges and difficulties.

Mei Hong, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out that the brilliance of artificial intelligence today is inseparable from opening up and open source. He suggested that, first of all, we should attach great importance to open source innovation, which will help to create an independent and controllable new information technology system, and also help to promote China's digital transformation and the development of digital economy. At the same time, we should really understand the open source, vigorously carry forward the spirit of open source, and grasp the essence of open source: openness, sharing, collaboration and ecology.

Take Google as an example. Google tried to apply its latest smart city concept to Toronto, Canada, but failed after years of effort and money. The starting point of all the participants in the plan is good, but the organizations and institutions that participate in the project can not cooperate to set a good goal.

This also fully shows that even if a city has data infrastructure, if the data can not drive decision-making, and the participants are generally hesitant and distrust each other, then the development of intelligence will not succeed.

In addition, the security and use of data also need to unify standards, not abuse. Hu houkun put forward three suggestions on how to promote the large-scale development of artificial intelligence industry: first, vigorously develop new urban infrastructure represented by Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, so that AI computing power can become a new type of urban public resources like water and electricity. Second, the technology should be rooted in the root, and the leaves can be luxuriant only when the root is deep. Third, boldly use technical means to change the AI application development mode and break through the bottleneck of AI inclusive.

In his opinion, with the continuous development of technology and the continuous emergence of requirements, the current application development efficiency has become the biggest bottleneck, which seriously hindered the combination of technology and demand. At present, AI development in the industry is highly dependent on experts and data, which not only needs to spend a lot of time collecting and processing data, but also consumes a lot of experts' energy for parameter tuning. It is difficult to meet the requirements of productization in a short time. This mode is called "manual workshop mode".

Therefore, we should use technical means to change the development mode and improve the development efficiency. In the future, the new mode of industrial AI development will greatly promote the development of AI in the industry.