While US-based companies like Alphabet, IBM, Facebook, and Microsoft typically dominate US artificial-intelligence headlines, China’s government is now accelerating the country’s own contributions to the field.Related:
China’s National Development and Reform Commission, a government agency tasked with planning economic and social strategies, will fund search giant Baidu’s development of a national deep-learning research lab, according to a post on Baidu’s Chinese WeChat account. The amount of funding was not disclosed, but Beijing-based Baidu will work with Tsinghua and Beihang universities, as well as other research Chinese institutions.
One important caveat: The laboratory won’t be a physical structure, but instead a digital network of researchers working on problems from their respective locations, according to the South Morning China Post. The research will focus on computer vision, biometric identification, intellectual property rights, and human-computer interaction.
Baidu is dedicating the head of its own Deep Learning Institute, Lin Yuanqing, to the project, as well as computer scientist Xu Wei. The Chinese Academy of scientists will also have two representatives in the lab.
Although America is not mentioned in the company’s post, Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng has been vocal about China’s accelerated AI growth compared to the US. Citing a statistic that more papers with Chinese than American authors were accepted into the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s 2017 conference, Ng tweeted that the rise of China’s AI research community was “astonishing.” That sentiment was echoed in the company’s WeChat post announcing the new lab....MORE
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