AI in china

The number of influential AI research papers coming from China is increasing rapidly, a data analysis shows.

Researchers examined not just the number of AI research papers coming from China but the quality of those papers—as judged by the number of citations they receive in other work. The study suggests that China will overtake the US in the most-cited 50% of research papers this year, the top 10% of research papers in 2020, and the top 1% by 2025.

Education in school is binary.

Either one ‘picks’ or ‘lifts’. Picking defines what you eventually become. Lifting has always been a drag, and life becomes a long ‘one’.

Great educators know this very well. And the way they teach is to rekindle your interest and curiosity, so that you ‘pick’ what they are teaching. And thus school is the best place to shape one’s life.

Administrators in China might not be aware of this binary system, but they know that to win the trade war, which is going to culminate in an ‘AI War’, they need a lot of sharp and eager minds to work on AI & ML.

And it’s elementary that the war they are fighting begins at school.

China is going to introduce the first set of 10 artificial-intelligence textbooks into hundreds of school campuses next spring. And they begin as early as elementary school.

These books have already been taught at a few selected schools in Shanghai as a pilot program.

‘Catch em young’ is a phrase often conversed, but seldom used . China wants to change that.

When the world is still focussed on computer literacy for all school students, China is going to be at least ten steps ahead now.

Next time, your kid wants a smartphone as a gift, buy him/her a Linux installed computer instead. And from there, she could ‘pick’ and her life would never be the same again.

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Great power comes with great responsibility. But history has been rife with innumerable examples, that it’s actually opposite. Not in one country, but in every nook and corner of this world. With power comes greed and greed knows no bound.

Technology while has made our life at least more comforting, it has been also a great extinction tool for despots and autocrats. Never it has been more relevant than in today’s world. AI and ML coin has also two sides. The good and bad one. May be the good and ugly one. And governments across the world are deploying these tools to increase their hold on very people who elected them.

China is rolling out new surveillance system which is capable of recognising people simply by the way they walk.

The “gait recognition” technology, developed by Chinese artificial intelligence firm Watrix, is capable of identifying individuals from the shape and movement of their silhouette from up to 50 metres away, even if their face is hidden.

The system is currently being used by police in Beijing and Shanghai. China has already a formidable surveillance network with an estimated 170 million CCTV cameras.

While the software can be used on standard surveillance and CCTV cameras, it does not work in real-time and takes up to 10 minutes to analyse the image. Well, needless to say, Moore’s law would come to it’s aid sooner than later.

You don’t need people’s cooperation for us to be able to recognise their identity.Gait analysis can’t be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because the software is  analysing all the features of the entire body (via).

Of course China is not alone in this endeavour, other countries including Japan, US and UK are interested in such systems.

Soon enough people would start demanding election manifestos include that state would not do surveillance on the subjects, unless approved by a court of law.

China’s state-run news agency Xinhua has unveiled the latest additions to its team of reporters — two AI anchors. The two anchors, one that speaks in English and another in Chinese, have the likeness of some of Xinhua’s human anchors, but their voices, facial expressions and mouth movements are synthesized and animated using deep learning techniques.

“AI anchors have officially become members of the Xinhua News Agency reporting team,” the agency said. “They will work with other anchors to bring you authoritative, timely and accurate news information in both Chinese and English.”

And yeah, these anchors can work 24*7.

Who is worried about the job loss?

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While the US is the world’s leader in AI discoveries, China is the leader in AI implementation.

In execution, Chinese entrepreneurs are unafraid of the tedious, messy, and risky tasks, if they help achieve the ultimate result. Chinese CEOs usually have absolute power within the company, which makes execution much more effective.

Fierce competition pushes entrepreneurs to improve the product at lightning speed, with incredible work ethic, always pressured to develop impregnable business models. As a result, Chinese products often evolved into better products than their American counterparts (e.g., Wechat vs. Whatsapp, Weibo vs. Twitter, Taobao vs. eBay).

Plus, China has DATA.

China’s data edge is three times the US based on mobile user ratio, 10 times the US in food delivery, 50 times in mobile payment, and 300 times in shared bicycle rides.

Via: Excerpts from the book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee.