Thursday, November 8, 2018 CHINA DAILY
14 WORLD INTERNET CONFERENCE
Visitors check out Baidu’s image recognition technology at the Fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday. ZHU XINGXIN / CHINA DAILY
ensure that AI is safe and reliable to its utmost extent? How to enjoy its benefits while protecting privacy? How we can maintain machines as they become smarter and more powerful?”
To raise the social awareness of AI technology, Microsoft has put forward six principles which are fairness, reliability and security, privacyprotection, inclusiveness, transparency and responsibility, which it believes can provide guidelines for ethical AI development. They have also established an ethics committee consisting of developers, researchers, legal affairs and
human resource experts to draft plans in managing and developing AI products.
Shum also called upon allgovernments and enterprises to come together and share resources and experiences to promote innovation with a sense of responsibility.
It is noticeable that AI hasgripped the cuttingedge technologies in China and worldwide. Among 15 world leading internet scientific achievements released at the conference, at least seven have integrated AI.
These achievements usingincreasingly smartermachines have covered awide range of areas, providing services for industry,including smart supply chainand computer processors,and individual’s lives, such asunmanned vehicles andsmart homes.
China’s ecommerce giantshave incorporated AI into their services to improve their
consumers’ experiences as online retail sales have soared in recent years.
For example, the SmartSupply Chain Technology Service Platform developed by JD, one of China’s largest online retailers, helps to enhance the efficiency of the supply chain, including inventory management, commodity selection, sales planning, pricing, demand forecasting and order fulfillment by rapidly digesting digital data via cloud computing and data analysis.
Alibaba Group haslaunched a supET industrial internet platform which supports the management of industrial internet of things services and app operations, as well as data analysis and application.
Electronics companies likeXiaomi and Huawei have made their digital devices smarter. The MI AI Speaker, launched by Xiaomi last July,
can be connected with home software such as the TV and stereo and can correspond with more than 115 million IoTintelligent devices.
The Ascend 310, a programAI processor developed by Huawei, and AI Platform Zhouyi which was independently developed by Arm China,also made breakthroughs in enlarging computing capacity and gives new solutions for future AI applications including safe city, selfdriving, smart manufacturing and robots.
Other AIrelated achievements include 360 Security Brain, Tesla Smart customer service and Amazon Sagemaker, a platform that helps cut down the complexity of machine training and enables developers to quickly build, train and deploy machine models at any scale.
Contact the writers at zhang[email protected]
Technology to help build new cyberspaceExperts call for sustained, increased investments and support for sector
By ZHANG YANGFEI and CAO YIN in Wuzhen, Zhejiang
Technology will continue tobe a driving force for global development, industry experts said at the Fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday.
Shahzad Gul Aryobee, minister of communications and information technology of Afghanistan, said: “Technology has a major role to play in every aspect of our life. It is also key for economic growth. Governments must invest in its growth and make it an integral part of their agenda.”
The minister said that technology has brought remarkable changes to his country’s businesses, medical activities and telecommunications. He said Afghanistan has made great efforts in developing its telecommunication infrastructure over the past 15 years, to help its residents receive education and live better lives.
Unlike the insufficient telecommunication infrastructure of 15 years ago, the country now has built more than 5,000 kilometers of optical fibers, “and is planning to build more in the following years”, he said.
Thanks to these efforts,about 80 percent of the residents in the country can use mobile phones and enjoy related services, the minister said.
The minister also laudedthe Chinese government’s support for establishing a digital corridor to improve regional technology connections.
At the same time, technology has helped boost the efficiency of government departments in Afghanistan. For example, the government has issued electronic identity cards as well as simplified the identity process of residents. The country is also planning to further boost telecommunication technologies, hoping to cover more areas, such as
schools and hospitals, he said.Petru Bogdan Cojocaru,
minister of communications and information society of Romania, said about 30 percent of the country’s GDP comes from technological industries.
Although Romania has witnessed and got benefits from the technology developments, it should do better in more aspects, such as infrastructure, he said.
The minister said the country would like to cooperate with other nations with an open mind and also further study some intelligent projects in accordance with market demands.
Sun Pishu, chairman andCEO of Inspur Group, said the core of technology development is computing. He said it is also one of the main propellers of today’s social change and digital economy, which is highly consistent with GDP growth.
He said computing hasbecome the major power to drive the transformation of the IT industry, especially withthe emergence of cloud computing, big data, blockchain and artificial intelligence.
“Technologies like smartphones, cloud computing and social networks have completely changed our lives in a quiet but farreaching way,” said Harry Shum, executive vicepresident of Microsoft.
He said that artificial intelligence will be the main technology trend that many companies and entrepreneurs get a grip on, but its impact onethics, law and the society should also be worth noticing.
“What we can be sure aboutis that AI will bring unprecedented breakthroughs to all aspects including healthcare, agricultural production, education and transportation, and these breakthroughs are happening rapidly.”
He said the questions leftunanswered about AI include “how to ensure that AI treats everyone equally? How to
Cuttingedge innovation efforts keep industry safe from threatsBy CAO YIN in Wuzhen, [email protected]
A new batch of leading scientific and technological internet achievements that have changed or are changing people’s lifestyles were released during the Fifth World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday.
The ceremony aims toshowcase the latest global scientific and technological achievements in the internet industry, promoting the concept of making internet technology innovative, green, inclusive and shared.
It will also highlight theextraordinary contribution of internet professionals and build a platform for exchanges
in innovation across the world.It is the third year that cut
tingedge scientific and technological achievements were introduced to the public during the conference.
This year, 15 internet achievements were given the award, including the WeChat Mini Programs Business Model Innovation, designed by Tencent, and 360 Brain of SecurityDistributed Intelligent Cybersecurity Protection System, developed by China’s largest security software provider Qihoo 360.
Zhou Hongyi, chairman andCEO of Qihoo 360, said the 360 Brain uses artificial intelligence and big data analysis to provide information about online attacks at the first instance itself. “The earlier we know about the threats, the quicker we can take measures
to counter them,” he said.“When we order food, have
drinks or deal with governmental affairs, we will use software. Each software may have
vulnerabilities, or they may be potentially attacked,” he said. “That’s why we have developed the 360 Brain, hoping it can help people find the online
WeChat banks on mini programs to open more growth doorsBy WANG KEJU in Wuzhen, [email protected]
WeChat, China’s top messaging app with over one billion monthly active users as of March, will add more mini programs to its platform as part of its efforts to unlock new business potential, a top company official said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the FifthWorld Internet Conferencein Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday, Pony Ma
Huateng, chairman and CEOof Tencent Group, said:“WeChat mini programs arean innovative breakthroughin the field of mobile internetand the new infrastructurefor interface capabilities,which enables more goodapps to be embedded inWeChat.”
By doing so, mini programsprovide services with a platform for better internet connection and create more opportunities for web traffic, he added.
Mini programs are mobile
applications of less than 10 megabytes built for and within the WeChat platform, whichincludes games, food delivery, shopping, government services, home services, image editing and more. Users do not have to download these mini apps separately.
For app developers, theyonly need to extract the core functions of the products and have them built into miniprograms, without developing separate programs and terminal adaptation.
For example, the shared
bike company Mobike has a miniprogram that enables users to locate bikes, unlock them and topup their account.
Since their launch last January, WeChat miniprograms have garnered 200 million daily users, rolled out 1 million miniprogram apps, and attracted the participation of more than 1.5 million developers and 2,300 thirdparty development platforms. They have also connected one billion users and over 200 categories of businesses.
In the past year, miniprograms have enabled direct information consumption of 209.7 billion yuan ($ 30.3 billion), which is equivalent to 4.7percent of the total information consumption of China in the same period, according to data on the social and economic impact of WeChat released by the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology in April.
Due to the platform effectof miniprograms, employment growth has also risen.
According to estimates, 1.04million new jobs are relatedto miniprograms and ofthese 380,000 were thosedirectly created by miniprograms last year.
“WeChat mini programs arelooking to tap more living scenarios, empower each WeChatuser with new productivity and promote the innovative development of the digital economy. We hope miniprograms will bring internet benefits to billions of people and build better lives for people,” Ma said.
What they say
“Technology is a core force in the development of countries and in spurring competition. I was glad to witness the release of the latest leading scientific and technological achievements. I was particularly impressed by the Ascend 310, developed by Huawei Technologies Co, as it could be a pivotal breakthrough in China’s chip research. Digitalization, or hightech, in fact, is changing or will change our lifestyles, which is its biggest contribution. But technology providers or internet enterprises should be prospective when promoting their products or services, because we expect them to not only bring convenience to our daily lives, but also safeguard us from cyber threats.”
Xie Maosong, a senior researcher with the China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy
“The Proprietary FinancialGrade Blockchain Platform of Ant Financial, designed by Ant Financial Services Group, was impressive. China is way ahead in finance and other services. The payment systems are so far ahead of others and then you can have other services on top of that, for example recommendation services of all kinds. That as a kind of commodity platform is growing rapidly and can be used all over the world. It was also interesting to see blockchain technologies being used in real applications.”
Michael Irwin Jordan, a scientist from the United States and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Technological changes and innovation has been maintaining strong momentum, while cyber threats are becoming more and more sophisticated and are springing up one after another, ranging from personal information and privacy leaks to infringement of intellectual property, from cyber crimes and cyber terrorism to various sophisticated cyberattacks. China has been making efforts in the past years for cybersecurity. The 360 Brain of security, a cybersecurity protection system released at the conference, is a good example of adopting new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and block chain to achieve the goal.”
Shen Yi, director of the Cyberspace Governance Research Center at Fudan University
CHINA DAILY
WeChat mini programs are looking to ... promote the innovative development of the digital economy.”Pony Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent Group
30 percent
of the Romanian GDP comes from technological industries
threats as quickly as it can.”Baidu, the largest search
engine in China, and Amazon Web Services, also got awards for their outstanding technological ideas and products.
Wu Hequan, president ofthe Internet Society of China, applauded the achievements. He said they are not only technological innovations, but alsoaspects that can change or are changing people’s lifestyles.
The latest achievements wereselected from more than 400 candidates that had been collected from China and other countries, such as the United States, Germany, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Canada, since July.
“The selected achievementsseek innovation from different perspectives, but they share thesame possibility of changing our lives in the future,” said Wu.
The selected achievements seekinnovation from different per
spectives, but they share the same possibility of changing our lives in the future.”Wu Hequan, president of the Internet Society of China
Alex Yung, vicepresident and managing director of Amazon Web Services in China, delivers a speech during an award ceremony in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday. ZOU HONG / CHINA DAILY