When we talk about AI, we always associate it with terms like frontier, cool, lab, etc. But for some groups, AI is a distant term, and the challenges we face every day are real.
Salt miners in a salt pan in Shandong Need to breathe corrosive air and be busy in the fierce sun;
Visually impaired people who want to get a guide dog need to wait in line for a long time, and the cost of training guide dogs is also very high;
After the double reduction, working mothers need to spend more time worrying about their children's education and growth, physically and mentally exhausted...
Should the work and life of these people be changed by AI?
The answer is yes. Technology has become the most powerful driving force in modern human society, and the Handbook of The Ethics of Technology, edited by Dr. Amin Grünwald of Germany, mentions that people should consciously use the imagination of technology as the purpose of developing technological innovation, regardless of gender, age, education level and cultural background, to bring benefits to many people and social groups as much as possible.
At the same time, the answer is also uncertain, because to let more people share the technology dividend, it requires the participation of a large number of developers and geeks, willing to focus on these areas, and promote the integration of technology and industry, scenarios, and needs, which is not a natural thing.
Continuously expanding the scope of action and imagination space for the development and application of AI technology is an indispensable and crucial "gaze" for all mankind in the era of intelligence.
On December 12, the WAVE SUMMIT+2021 Deep Learning Developer Summit hosted by the National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technology and Applications was held in Shanghai. At this technology event that brings together many AI developers, I really feel that a new generation of AI talents is staring at more and more groups and scenarios. Among them, the Baidu Flying Propeller deep learning platform has become a link between them, and through these diverse perspectives, the connection between people and AI and between people is becoming closer than ever.
I interviewed a lot of young AI developers on the spot, hoping to tell you their stories. From their perspective, they may be able to find the eyes, heart, and road of intelligent China.
Eyes: At WAVE SUMMIT+2021, looking for the "gaze" of the times
Gaze is a concept proposed by the philosopher Lacan, who believes that people perceive themselves by seeing others, and thus establish a connection between themselves and others. In the process of AI development, it is an indispensable part to let more groups be seen and more developers have the desire and possibility of "staring" at others.
For example, the proportion of female technology practitioners is relatively rare, and it is difficult for some people in non-technical fields to actively apply technology, and they are underrepresented in the technology industry, and it is easy to have algorithmic bias or errors. For AI to benefit the whole society as much as possible, it needs to be more diversified and "gaze" at innovative talents of various groups.
At this WAVE SUMMIT+ Deep Learning Developer Summit, I saw a different technology landscape through many young AI developers.
Gao Hongzhi, a technical expert of flying paddle developers, saw the scarcity of guide dogs and the reality of blind group travel, combined with low-cost robot dog hardware and Baidu's open source capabilities in the field of computer vision, developed a machine guide dog that may help blind people travel and daily life in the future.
Computer science students Wang Rongsheng and Yang Guoqing saw the shortage of medical resources in Wuhan during the prevention and control of the new crown epidemic during their school years, and began to explore the direction of combining AI and medical treatment. Through the flying oar, the use of deep learning to create a marginal heart sound auscultation diagnostic equipment, can extract and initially identify the heart sound characteristics, can be at home on the abnormal signal early warning, probably predict four heart diseases, supervise suspected patients to seek medical treatment in time, reduce the actual heart disease misdiagnosis rate.
Feng Huiyu, a junior at Qingdao Agricultural University, saw an area that was rarely noticed but was closely related to public life: salting. In the team's hometown of Changyi, Shandong, people have been using the traditional method of salting, which requires manual measurement of water level height and artificial ploughing to prevent compaction. The sea breeze in the working environment has high humidity, high corrosiveness, and great irritation to the skin; the sun is too strong and the ultraviolet rays are strong, so people who have been engaged in salt work for a long time are prone to be injured by the sea breeze.
"Isn't there already a water level height sensor, and why don't you use it in the salt pans?" In the face of my question, Feng Huiyu laughed, he had thought so before, and later found that the concentration of salt water is very high, and the current common liquid sensor can only measure the concentration of ions, while the salt pool is often a saturated solution, and the sensor cannot be used.
In the end, he and his team chose the way of image recognition, collected pictures of different stages of the salt pan, selected and trained the model through the flying paddle, and developed the application project of "intelligent recognition and auxiliary diagnosis of the image of salt in the circle", which can observe the water volume and crystallinity of the salt pan in real time, and timely remind the staff to fish for salt, which greatly reduces the burden on the salt farm workers.
Kou Yao, who graduated with a master's degree in art and culture management, often hears friends who have become mothers around him complain: children are always bored in the car, and the pressure to drive and take a baby is too great... She wondered if it was possible to combine AI with smart cars to create a mobile home for children and use travel time as immersive interactive education.
So she based on Baidu flying paddle, the use of image recognition technology, so that the car window can interact with children, explain the things in the street scene, to meet the child's curiosity; through the image segmentation rendering, developed the function of painting in the car window, during the trip can stimulate children's innovative thinking anytime and anywhere. When encountering tunnels or night scenes, the car automatically renders the starry sky effects of the meta-universe, turning the sudden arrival of darkness into beautiful memories.
When it comes to the meta-universe, Wang Mengyao, who is studying science and technology art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, combines Chinese painting elements with AI to create a "Chinese painting version" meta-universe. She uses the image segmentation technology of the flying oar to separate the elements such as people, landscapes, trees, flowers, birds and other elements in the Chinese painting, and reshape the new 3D world in the virtual space, guiding the audience to explore the landscape in the classic Chinese paintings of the dynasties through VR equipment in such a meta-universe world, so that the audience can see the beauty of traditional Chinese culture in Danqing ink.
There are many similar cases in the developer market at WAVE SUMMIT+2021, ai developers regardless of profession, gender, age, let me see, when this generation of talents gaze at the endless distance, countless people, will bring about a vibrant technological innovation.
Heart: Listen to the voices of innovative talents and see how the dream of AI is woven?
While marveling at the rich and colorful AI ecosystem, I also found that some developers, especially zero-based, school students, have practical needs when chasing AI dreams.
1. Leader. Many AI developers themselves are not machine learning or even computer professionals, which not only allows AI to collide across fields, innovation blossoms, but also makes many developers encounter difficult problems when getting started and practicing. At this time, it is necessary to have a professional in the field of AI to play the role of "leader".
Take Feng Huiyu of the "Smart Salting" project, as an engineering student at an agricultural university, she has nothing to do with AI, and the progress of self-taught AI is very slow. Later, after learning about the "AI Talent Creation Camp" activity launched by the Baidu Flying Oar Pilot Group, he joined the "30-day AI Project Whole Process Practice", and connected with the official engineer of the Flying Oar, received meticulous guidance and help in the process, and opened his own AI research road.
(Hui Yu's team collects data on the ground at the salt field)
2. Companions. At WAVE SUMMIT+2021, there are many excellent female developer cases. In a conversation with Kou Yao of the "Mobile Hut" project, she told me that as a female developer, there is a lack of technical atmosphere around her, which also discourages many women from releasing their talents in the field of AI. Talking about the partners in the Flying Paddle community, she was particularly excited to mention the help given to her by other project developers and Flying Paddle technicians, many of whom are talented sisters who are willing to share and help others, and these companions on the road of innovation make Kou Yao no longer feel alone.
I noticed that in order to activate more women to bravely embrace AI and create a more inclusive and diverse AI community, THE WAVE SUMMIT+2021 also set up a sub-forum of "scientific and technological innovation, women's power", female scientists, teachers, researchers from optical communications, Beidou satellite navigation, emotion recognition, low-code development, smart medical and other fields, all shared their insights from their respective research fields, and also let the female developers on the scene feel that technology and women are not far away. Women can also give full play to their professional advantages and talents in the intelligent era to support "half the sky" for scientific and technological innovation.
One of the things that impressed me the most was that in the roundtable discussion, several of the participating guests encouraged the "back wave" to dare to challenge themselves and tackle the "card neck" problem, and this encouragement from the "peers" is very important for many developers to adhere to the road of technological innovation.
3. Resource pool. Of course, what AI developers need most and are most in short supply is real-world resources such as toolkits, computing power, and tutorials. Yang Guoqing of the "Heartbeat Signal" project told me that the calculation work in the research is carried out on the flying paddle, and the flying oar is very friendly to the developer's computing power support, enough to support him to run the project, and there are rich APIs and pre-training models to make his AI development more convenient; in addition, he will often go to the flying paddle AI Studio artificial intelligence learning and training community, which has a full range of guidance tutorials to refer to. At present, his main expenditure is to buy a more expensive development board.
Listening to the voices of AI developers on the spot also made me fully feel how strong the support behind the vigorous development of AI in China and the rise of a new generation of AI people is, and how rigid it is for developers.
Road: Baidu Road, the future of smart China
From the moment the AI boom began to surge, the shortage of talent became the main theme of this field. On the one hand, the number of people cultivated in the frontier field every year is limited, it is difficult to meet the rapid growth of industrial employment needs, major domestic universities have opened relevant majors, science and technology companies have also implemented the integration of industry and education strategy, hoping to alleviate the thirst of AI innovation talents; on the other hand, AI needs to understand both technology and industry compound talents, the requirements are relatively high, can not be quickly, a single model to cultivate.
Therefore, at this WAVE SUMMIT Summit, Wang Haifeng, director of Baidu CTO and Deep Learning Technology and Application National Engineering Laboratory, specifically mentioned that with the deep integration of AI and industry, the shortage of AI talents will be a long-term challenge, and more and more compound AI talents will be needed in the future, who understand AI and have industrial experience. All along, Feipao has been committed to the cultivation of composite AI talents, uniting academia and industry, opening up the positive cycle of production, education and research, and continuing to contribute AI talents to society.
The summit also handed over the latest report card of Feipao: condensing 4.06 million developers, creating 476,000 models, serving 157,000 enterprises and institutions, and ranking first in the comprehensive market share of China's deep learning platform.
You may ask, why is Baidu Flying Oar at the forefront of the times and has become a fertile ground for the growth of AI talents? There are three main factors.
1. The underlying capability of Baidu's scientific and technological innovation. Baidu has become a business card of Chinese AI, one of the earliest Chinese technology enterprises to invest in the research and development of the underlying AI, and can provide a technological source for the cutting-edge exploration of AI developers, universities and enterprises.
2. Flying Propeller open source open platform features. As China's first industry-grade deep learning platform with independent research and development, rich functions and open source, Feipao continues to open up Baidu's core technology to the industry and developers.
At the summit, Feipao also released ten latest technological and ecological progress, including the new panorama of Feipao - the new Wenxin big model of the industrial model library, the industry's first industrial practice example library, the Feipao "Great Navigation" 2.0 co-creation plan, the Feipao open source framework v2.2 systematic new scientific computing API, end-to-end adaptive large-scale distributed training technology, text task full-process acceleration, multi-level and low-cost hardware adaptation scheme, more than 400 industrial-level open source model library models, The Enterprise Edition upgrades the automatic and efficient model deployment function, and the Flying Propeller EasyDL desktop version that completes the local efficient modeling is installed at a 1-minute speed.
3. Attach importance to the cultural characteristics of ecology. At the previous WAVE SUMMIT Summit, Feipao has officially launched the "Great Navigation" plan, saying that it will invest 1.5 billion yuan in funds and resources in the future to work with universities, "escort" plans to unite industries, and "pilot" plans to build an open source ecosystem for flying paddles through the "Departure" plan.
At yesterday's WAVE SUMMIT+2021, Wu Tian, vice president of Baidu Group and deputy director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Deep Learning Technology and Application, released the "Great Navigation" plan 2.0, on the basis of the three major channels of departure, escort and pilot, a new "co-creation" plan was added, with the flying paddle platform as the base, community developers co-create tools, models, industrial cases and practical experience; forming an industrial innovation demand docking platform to create a positive cycle of production, education and research Work with ecological partners to build an artificial intelligence industry empowerment center to create a regional innovation ecology.
AI is the key winner in the global technology change, and every technical talent is eager to seize this technical gift and become the river crosser and tide of the times. In the face of the gulf between developers and technology, Feipao continues to build a prosperous ecological platform and tools at hand, ferrying a new generation of AI people to the other side of their dreams. The successive integration of AI people and all walks of life can stimulate rich and diversified creativity, help various industries improve quality and efficiency, and ultimately achieve the independence and breakthrough of Chinese science and technology.
It is not difficult to imagine how next year's WAVE will be a blossoming scene of innovation. Talent training, which is the "avenue" that Baidu Feipao adheres to, also allows Intelligent China to accelerate along the solid talent track.
There is a passage in the Handbook of The Ethics of Technology that advances in technology have expanded the possibilities of human action, and what was previously impossible for humans to do, or the fate of people who were considered unchangeable, is now the object of technological change. The meaning of technology is to seek a future with survival value for most living organisms, rather than to maximize short-term profits for a small number of living organisms.
It is said that a hundred years of tree people, AI talent training for today's China, is a correct and slow effect of the thing, because of this, the need for responsible enterprises to build a base for long-term value.
With the flying propeller as the base, more outstanding talents stand out, representing more perspectives that are exploring AI and applying AI. When more groups will be illuminated by the light of technology, AI will truly become a technology full of love and kindness, and it also heralds the opening of a larger industrial space.
Under the rapid progress of the times, the "gaze" of AI talents is the only way to connect the whole society and the intelligent future.