China welcomes AI and Its Infinite Possibilities

Shanghai Newspaper_Artificial Intelligence

A set of policies and agreements are presented to be signed at the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which opened in Shanghai yesterday.

This year’s theme is “Intelligent Connectivity, Infinite Possibilities.” The event, which was inaugurated at the Shanghai Expo Center, welcomes about 500 guests and speakers including Nobel laureates, researchers, IT scientists, government officials and leaders of dot-com giants in attendance.

Almost half of the speakers at the forums are from overseas. Topics ranging from education, intelligent algorithms, chips and smart hardware to unmanned driving and 5G will be covered in the event.

Huawei’s 5G innovation center, CloudWalk’s global operation center and IBM Watson’s center and 70 more AI and 5G projects will be signed at the three-day conference,

10 new companies were enrolled in the national platform which was previously dominated by tech giants ,Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlytek. Each one of them are focusing on a particular AI category; Baidu on self-driving and iFlytek on voice recognition. Also included in the list are Yitu and Mininglamp from Shanghai, plus giants such as Huawei and JD.com. Two Shanghai-based firms will join the national open innovation platform for next-generation AI, the first local companies to do so.

Shanghai gives the city a clear head start over others in the country in developing an AI platform. It has talent, advanced manufacturing and chip industries. There are more than 1,000 core AI enterprises and more than 3,000 pan-AI enterprises in Shanghai and the scale of related industries exceeds 70 billion yuan (US$9.8 billion),

Over 200,000 visitors are expected to participate in the event, slightly higher compared to last year’s 170,000 attendees.