Time to put AI knowledge to practical use

China continues to make world-leading contributions to artificial intelligence but needs to emphasize results

Google is no stranger to headlines. But this time it is hogging the limelight because its artificial intelligence-powered AlphaGo defeated South Korean Go master Lee Se-dol 4-1 in a five-match series.

AlphaGo's victory has also prompted some observers to say Google is far ahead of Chinese technology companies in terms of AI research. Such a conclusion, however, does not reflect reality.

In terms of pure theoretical research in AI, China hardly lags behind the United States or any other country. Actually, it is hard to say which country is the leader because researchers across the world are cooperating rather than competing with each other.

When a team achieves a technological breakthrough, it prefers to publish it in academic journals, which not only helps protect its intellectual rights, but also allows researchers in other countries to share the vital information.

If we insist on comparing China and the US, there is hardly any gap between them because Chinese researchers have published almost as many papers as their US counterparts. At the 2015 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Beijing in July, the chairperson, Yang Qiang, who is also head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said more papers were received and accepted from researchers in China than from any other country. That is the best footnote on AI researchers in China.

However, there are gaps between China and the US in other fields of AI. China lags behind the US when it comes to putting its theoretical achievements into practical use.

In image recognition, an essential subsector of AI research, for example, our AI at Baidu can judge whether a face belongs to a certain person more accurately than humans do in a laboratory environment. But the same AI can hardly recognize a person's face in a group of similar ones, which can be easily done by a human being. So Chinese researchers need to find ways to better combine theory with practical use.

Google does this quite well. The driverless car it has been testing is a very good combination of image recognition, scene understanding and automatic control technologies. By combining them well, Google has made a hitherto unthinkable product.

Creative thinking is another subsector in which Chinese researchers lag relatively behind their counterparts in some advanced countries. In other words, some creative products can be made by any company, but the one that makes it first is the winner.

Google's driverless car is one such example. The idea of a driverless car has been around since the 1980s, but Google took the lead in research in the current model. Chinese researchers have been working on it, too, but they are years behind Google because they were not confident about the concept until Google announced its achievement.

Another example is Google Glass contact lens, the prototype of which emerged in April 2014 and can monitor the blood sugar levels of the user. The application of the technology is valuable, but more valuable is the idea of combining a blood sugar-monitoring device with contact lenses. These examples should, in the least, prompt Chinese researchers to think more creatively and apply the results to practical uses.

The author is a software engineer at Chinese Internet company Baidu Inc. This is an excerpt from his interview with China Daily reporter Zhang Zhouxiang. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

(China Daily European Weekly 03/25/2016 page10)