Behind the "Chinese brain" is the technological innovation of artificial intelligence.

Just opened the two sessions, the CPPCC members, Baidu CEO Robin Li in the proposal mentioned a very cutting-edge idea: the establishment of the "Chinese brain" plan to promote the development of artificial intelligence, to seize the new round of scientific and technological revolution commanding Heights.

"This project is to do an artificial intelligence infrastructure, the corresponding large-scale service set up, and open to scientific research institutions, private enterprises, state-owned enterprises, entrepreneurs and other social aspects, so that everyone in this platform to try speech recognition, visual recognition, natural language understanding, intelligent robots and so on. "Artificial intelligence as a representative of cutting-edge technology in the 21st century, its importance may be compared with the Apollo moon landing, the Human Genome Project, the global information revolution, will have a profound impact on human economic and social."

1. The importance of artificial intelligence--the next technological revolution

The importance of artificial intelligence will first be shown in the economic sphere, which will bring innovation and change to almost all industries. Deloitte DUP, a report released last year, listed eight economic areas that could be affected by artificial intelligence, including banking, automated fraud detection systems use machine learning to identify behavioral patterns that portend fraudulent payment actions; Voice recognition technology enables automatic telephone service; Voice recognition verifies caller identity.

Medical and health areas, half of America's hospitals use automated speech recognition to help doctors automate their medical orders, and the rate of use is growing rapidly; the machine vision system completes the analysis of mammograms and other medical effects automatically; IBM's Watson has used natural language processing techniques to read and understand a great deal of medical literature, By assuming automatic generation to complete automatic diagnosis, the use of machine learning can improve the accuracy rate.

In the field of life sciences, machine learning systems are used to predict the causal relationship between biological data and the activity of compounds, thus helping pharmaceutical companies identify the most promising drugs. In addition, the media entertainment industry, the public sector. BROADBANDTV, CTO Mehrdad Fatourechi, said natural language processing and machine translation in artificial intelligence would revolutionize travel and communications; machine learning and augmented reality will revolutionize advertising, and so on.

According to the definition of artificial intelligence "to realize all the tasks that can not be realized without the help of human intelligence", the significance of this is not only to have a positive impact on related industries and fields, but also to enhance and extend the human intelligence.

One of the important differences between humans and machines is that the former has the ability to be conscious, try, and learn, and the research of artificial intelligence is to make machines possess these qualities, for example, deep learning is inspired by the workings of the human brain Neural network, At present, the image recognition technology based on depth learning has been able to identify a person in a very large collection of human images, which is far beyond human processing power.

Therefore, with the development of artificial intelligence, it brings not only more intelligent automatic diagnosis and real-time logistics decision support and other practical applications, but also a new insight into the world, and better help human decision-making. By then we can outsource more work to machines, and it will become a human "second brain". Therefore, artificial intelligence has the same important meaning to the social level and the national level.

2. The layout of developed countries

The United States, the European Union and other developed countries have already begun to focus on the field of artificial intelligence support, some of their relevant departments are also active cooperation with technology companies. Here are a few examples, perhaps we can get some experience from it.

1 The European Union Human Brain Program

The European Union's human brain is scheduled to be selected for the EU's future flagship technology project in 2013, with € 1 billion trillion in funding, and the world's most important research project on human brains. The project aims to establish a new and revolutionary information and communication technology based on neuroscience.

Build a chip that simulates neuron function and then use the chip to build a supercomputer. Using HBP's High-performance computing system, neuro-morphological computing systems and neuro-robotic platforms to develop new computing and applications, researchers have developed software prototypes with market-potential applications with neural-morphological computing systems and neuro-robotic platforms.

These prototypes include home robots, manufacturing robots and service robots that have powerful data mining, maneuvering control, video processing and imaging, and information communication.

2 Google and DARPA robots

Google acquired the Boston Power Company (Boston Dynamics) at the end of 2013, which had been in close contact with DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and was awarded a 10.9 million dollar contract to develop humanoid robots as early as 2012.

2013, the Boston Power Company for DARPA to develop better mute performance, bulletproof more powerful "big dog" robot, planned to start in 2015 to participate in the relevant military exercises, in order to combat the combat personnel to reduce risk.

Earlier this year, Boston Power also released the robot spot, which uses electrical and hydraulic brakes, which can be used indoors and outdoors, and its head sensors can help it navigate through rugged roads.

Given the previous robot big Dog has been used by the U.S. military in the complex terrain of military training, so spot in the military potential role is also beyond doubt.

3 IBM and DARPA-like brain chips

The United States Defense Advanced Research Program (DARPA) launched the adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronic Neural system "bae of Neuromorphic re-use Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE)" in November 2008 Project. In the first phase of the Synapse project, DARPA provided 4.9 million dollars in funding to IBM and the 5 universities it had studied together.

In August 2014, IBM released Synapse's latest results truenorth--can simulate the human brain chip, compared to previous prototypes, the new chip has reached the mass production requirements, and has 1 million "neuron" core, 256 million "synaptic" kernel and 4,096 "synapses "The kernel, and the power is only 70 watts, the chip can imitate the human brain mode of operation, better for pattern recognition, and low power, in cognitive computing to far through the traditional computing architecture."

Since the new synapse chip may be disruptive to the current human computing system, IBM has developed a new set of programming languages to work with. At the same time, IBM has launched the Synapse University education program, which received sponsorship money from DARPA5300 million dollars.

4. NASA and the University of Singularity

The University of Singularity is a university that educates, encourages, and teaches that leaders will grow exponentially in the application of technology in addressing the major challenges of humanity. Google, Cisco, Nokia and Gene Terry became partners in the 2009 when the university was founded.

Other funders include Autodesk, Fauffman fund and Eplanet Capital. The university is located at NASA's Ames Research Center and NASA provides site support. Now, the Singularity University has hatched many AI projects such as Matternet drones.

5) DARPA

The High Institute of Defense (DARPA), which is often mentioned above, is itself a national department focused on cutting-edge research in scientific and technological innovation, and has pioneered many research work in the field of artificial intelligence, Siri's smart Assistant, for example, was born out of a 5-year calo (cognitive Assistant that learns and organizes) investment in the U.S. Advanced Research Program (DARPA), which took over 150 million dollars. Is the first in the United States to obtain large-scale industrial applications of artificial intelligence project.

DARPA is currently working on a new project called "CwC" (communication with computers) aimed at breaking the language barrier between people and machines, so that computers can express themselves by using colloquial, facial expressions and gestures like humans.

In addition, there are many projects related to artificial intelligence, such as brain chip, human avatar program and so on, mentioned above.

DARPA's mode of operation is research outsourcing, which does not do scientific research, but allocates annual research funds to laboratories and technology companies in various universities for a wide range of cutting-edge research. Judging from the great achievements of DARPA over the years, this mechanism of open cooperation at the national level looks fruitful, and this is echoed by Li's set of artificial intelligence platforms and open resources.

3. The opportunity of "Chinese brain"

It must be acknowledged that artificial intelligence will have a positive impact on the economic sector and society as a whole, while developed countries have been active in this area and have achieved impressive results, but there are also some problems, such as the European Union human Brain Program and IBM's brain-like chip has suffered Facebook AI director Yann LeCun criticism.

"Fundamentally, much of the European human-brain program (Human Brain project) is based on the idea that we should build a chip that simulates neuron function, the closer the better, and then the chip is used to build supercomputers, when we use some learning rules to open it," he said. Ai appeared. I think it's sheer nonsense. But in fact, what we need is a machine that thinks, not a machine that thinks like a human brain.

The deep learning in artificial intelligence is to give the machine learning ability, so that the machine can learn from the data. Baidu, Google, Facebook and other technology giants are also through in-depth learning also realized the landing of artificial intelligence, to provide users with better products and services, in the technology upgrade has made an explosion of growth.

The future of the "AI infrastructure" will focus on the establishment of corresponding large-scale services, open to the scientific research institutions, private enterprises, state-owned enterprises, entrepreneurs and other social aspects, this involves intelligent human-computer interaction, large data analysis and prediction, automatic driving, intelligent medical diagnosis, intelligent unmanned aircraft, military and civilian robotics and other important research areas, It continues to enhance the technical level of speech recognition, visual recognition, natural language understanding and intelligent robot, and then reflects the national competitiveness.

What is the success of a technology project with a level of imagination? Look at the U.S. "Apollo Landing program" led to a large number of enterprise growth and innovation, the U.S. military DARPA ARPANET derived the Internet to know.

More importantly, this "government uses a big project to build a science and technology infrastructure, and then open it to the whole society, who would like to participate in the example, once evolved into a" government and science and technology enterprises deep cooperation, mutual promotion, "a new paradigm of economic development, That contribution to China's economy will be much more than harvest a number of star technology enterprises and scientific and technological achievements, but will be the whole economic and social transformation power.

Let's look forward to that day, a future that will bring change from cutting-edge technology and technology companies.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)