Focus on an idea and you'll be obsessed with it. Craft an idea and you'll be attached to it. Ignoring an idea, you'll regret it. You'll need to be especially careful with early, immature ideas, but perhaps you can also leave it to the Enterprise Institute.
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Author | Wu Tong
Edit | Twilight Caixian
In terms of the long-term development of enterprises and AI, the Enterprise AI Research Institute represents a type of corporate culture.
Enterprises have their own unique character and history, but also have their own suitable for its growth and survival space, so it has its own existing boundaries and picture. It is precisely because of this long-term accumulation of corporate tone that it has its most unique innovation value.
But so did the conundrum. How to achieve the same frequency resonance between technology and services? How to transform new technologies into real productivity and put them on the market to complete the real commercialization closed loop?
In the "2021 Artificial Intelligence Innovation Research Institute (AI Labs) Report" released by MIT Science and Technology Review, 10 domestic AI research institutes with technological innovation and leadership are listed, and in-depth investigation found that these ten AI Labs may provide three solutions to solve these problems:
First, with the underlying technology as the cornerstone, the enterprise research institute exploring the boundless vertical track is represented by iFLYTEK, SenseTime, Tencent, and Ali. They embrace various subdivision scenarios such as cities, life, automobiles, education, medical care, consumer goods, and industry, and belong to a group of enterprises that are good at taking the road and daring to squeeze the road in the wave of intelligence. They are both interoperable and one-person, solving major social propositions in systematic technological innovation.
Second, pay attention to the underlying technology, focus on a vertical field, represented by Microsoft, Huawei, and Baidu. They quickly find their own direction in the tide of AI empowerment, forming a unique territory of Microsoft for the computing revolution, Huawei for communications, and Baidu for smart cars.
Third, the research institute for scenario-oriented AI, represented by JD.com, Byte, and Xiaomi, is facing retail, entertainment and home scenes respectively, excavating the intrinsic genes of enterprises that have been deeply cultivating scenes for many years, and forming a technical long board with AI empowerment.
In the new era of intelligence, exploring new values, and closely integrating with society, industry and market, a group of enterprises are flocking to the vertical track, what is the unique way?
Among them, iFLYTEK Research Institute of HKUST was listed as "Solving the Needs of Society with Systematic Innovation". The reasons for selection are:
In the past 22 years, we have always adhered to the concept and pursuit of "standing on top of the sky", and through source technological innovation, we have set up a number of milestones in speech synthesis, speech recognition, cognitive intelligence and other milestones in the history of artificial intelligence development, and promoted intelligent speech and artificial intelligence to walk in the forefront of the world. Lead the promotion of large-scale application of artificial intelligence technology in education, medical care, cities, consumer goods, industrial and other scenarios.
In the final analysis, how did iFLYTEK Research Institute of HKUST become?
1
Xunfei Research Institute: Step by step up the stairs
iFLYTEK Research Institute was formally established in 2005, adhering to the principle of "using the right method and doing useful research", and the research and development fields include intelligent speech, natural language processing, computer vision, basic theory of artificial intelligence, etc., with a research and development scale of more than 1,000 people.
iFLYTEK Research Institute was established early, since the establishment of iFLYTEK in 1999, there is a corresponding research team, and then formally established in 2005.
In the past 17 years of development, iFLYTEK Research Institute has led the construction of national platforms such as the National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing and the State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Intelligence, and has fruitful technical achievements in the fields of speech, NLP and CV.
In the field of speech, he led the formulation of the world's first national standard of iso/IEC for intellect and phonetics, won the CHiME, Blizzard Challenge, IWSLT and other international evaluation championships for many times, took the lead in realizing the automatic evaluation of spoken language to reach the level of manual experts, and won the OpenASR Multilingual Speech Recognition Challenge champion in 2021;
In the field of NLP, the medical examination robot developed in 2017 passed the national clinical practitioner qualification examination for the first time in the world, won more than 20 international evaluation championships in the past 5 years, won the first prize of the Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Progress Award in 2021, open sourced a number of cutting-edge NLP models and was widely used;
In the field of CV, more than ten original achievements have been proposed in the direction of graphic and text analysis and virtual image. In 2021, iFLYTEK released the Virtual Human Interaction Platform 1.0 to promote the integration and innovation of multimodal technologies.
At present, iFLYTEK has won the "China Patent Gold Award", the highest award in the field of intellectual property in China, with 3800+ patents and 1800+ authorized patents worldwide, and in 2021, it has won the "China Patent Gold Award", the highest award in the field of intellectual property in China, promoting China's intelligent voice and artificial intelligence technology to be at the forefront of the world.
iFLYTEK's technology convergence drives the source technology breakthrough, which is not only establishing a "milestone" in the development of artificial intelligence, but also becoming a "national team" in the breakthrough of artificial intelligence.
2
From single-point technology breakthroughs to systematic innovations
In 2010, iFLYTEK took the lead in releasing the iFLYTEK Voice Cloud Platform, and in 2017 upgraded it to become a new generation of open innovation platform for intelligent voice countries, and at the Fifth Global 1024 Developer Festival this year, iFLYTEK launched a series of technical achievements such as the open platform 2.0 strategy, the enterprise iFLYTEK digital platform, and the "1024 Plan".
Based on the 2.0 strategy of iFLYTEK Open Platform, iFLYTEK will work together with the industry leaders with the most resources and platform capabilities in the industry to build the industry's baseline base, and after that, open many scenarios to developers.
At present, the iFLYTEK Open Platform 2.0 strategy focuses on the development of low code and zero code in the industry for 18 tracks. iFLYTEK has brought many technological innovations in the four main areas of end-to-end modeling, unsupervised training, multimodal fusion, and external knowledge integration, and as of December 31, 2021, the iFLYTEK open platform has opened 449 AI products and capabilities, gathering more than 2.93 million developer teams. The new "1024 Plan" focuses on four aspects: source innovation, scene co-creation, shared ecology, and practice of public welfare.
Go alone fast, go far. This indisputable old saying has reduced the meaning of "no, but" in the era of intelligence, and evolved into a survival technique that "wants both and wants".
Hu Guoping, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK and President of the Institute
"We will have some tracks that we focus on, but we still have more of our core AI capabilities, which can be opened to more developers and partners in an open platform way, and they will find industries and scenarios that they are good at or familiar with to achieve AI empowerment and landing." Hu Guoping, co-founder and dean of the research institute of iFLYTEK, said that this is the playing style and strategy of iFLYTEK.
Liu Qingfeng, Chairman of iFLYTEK
Similarly, Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFLYTEK, once said, "At present, the development of artificial intelligence is facing four major opportunities: scenario-driven, data-supported, technology-driven, and capital-driven. We have always unswervingly believed that only if enterprises are willing to open up their resources and capabilities to form an industrial chain and ecological system, can they develop endlessly. ”
iFLYTEK hopes that developers in various fields can almost not understand the core technology when developing applications in various industries, and can solve key problems in the industry through free orchestration and visual logic processing.
Technology is better to use, one is to create an open source universal platform, work with partners and developers to build a new infrastructure in the era of artificial intelligence, and promote the landing of artificial intelligence. Second, when the hard technology industry matures, opportunities will certainly shift to various application innovation layers.
This is the market strategy of "platform + track" upheld by iFLYTEK. iFLYTEK Research Institute is looking for more possibilities.
3
From the technology, to the product
President Hu Guoping mentioned many times, "From technology, to products." ”
Landing products, multiple tracks in front of you. Now, iFLYTEK Research Institute is promoting the large-scale application of AI in education, medical care, cities, life, industry and other scenarios.
Taking the field of education as an example, iFLYTEK paid attention to the educational reform of "large-scale education and personalized cultivation" earlier, coinciding with the launch of the policy of double reduction in education in 2021, and launched a new masterpiece to focus on the AI learning machine of primary and secondary school students' education.
Liu Qingfeng said, "We have been thinking and exploring what the technological progress of artificial intelligence can bring to children. How to truly achieve the teaching we have been looking forward to, reduce burdens and increase efficiency, and achieve a high-quality balance of education? ”
Today, we have more education big data to help with analytics.
iFLYTEK undertook the education big data project jointly launched by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China and the National Development and Reform Commission, counted 3.5 billion children's homework, visited 16 cities, 5,500 users, gathered more than 10,000 customer suggestions, and finally merged similar items, determined the weight, and found that 60% of the homework exercises were invalid, inefficient and repetitive.
Under GSP education, different children do the same practice problems, and the teacher and the child do not know each other's academic ability and improvement program.
How can education be equally oriented to everyone, suitable for everyone, and accompany everyone?
iFLYTEK bases this problem on two points: AI learning diagnosis and AI growth protection.
Further, on the one hand, the AI learning situation diagnosis function can help teachers reduce their burden and increase efficiency, and quickly find the students' fast and weak links through intelligent scanning and correction of examination papers, and then help children learn and consolidate in a targeted manner. On the other hand, the AI learning machine has created technical conditions for students' independent learning, such as 1-on-1 oral tutoring, composition correction and other difficult to quantify learning content, iFLYTEK uses semantic understanding and reasoning technology to introduce personalized learning functions into daily life, and plan the optimal improvement path for each child.
In addition, in the child's learning and growth, the learning machine has done a lot of detailed work around the parents' concerned vision, sitting posture, and learning interest, for example, in this AI learning machine, it is equipped with an integrated lifting and lowering of 16 million pairs of current cameras and built-in multiple sensors, and launched a low blue light screen that automatically adjusts to protect the eyes with the ambient light source, an anti-glare paper writing film, and predicts the learning posture through the AI answer pen.
Behind this is the perseverance of iFLYTEK Research Institute's determination to precipitate and apply technology.
From the usable level of speech synthesis in the last century, to the launch of speech evaluation and speech recognition in the first decade of this century, the promotion of speech interaction, semantic understanding, and brain science research in the second decade, and the vigorous launch of multilingual research and multimodal fusion interaction technology in the third decade, iFLYTEK is taking an evolutionary path of "mouth awakening brain" and "brain mobilization of limbs".
Similarly, iFLYTEK also hopes to use smarter AI to unleash greater human creativity.
Looking back, "I have been doing technology for more than 20 years at Xunfei, what are we doing at Xunfei Research Institute?" President Hu Guoping asked for his own and also asked the enterprise.
"First, we don't do speech, we do deep learning algorithms.
Second, we are not just doing technology, but more importantly, to predict what kind of technology will change from unavailable or from experimental to usable in the next two or three years, crossing the threshold of use. ”
Liu Cong, Executive Director of iFLYTEK Research Institute of HKUST, said, "In the past 17 years, I have had the privilege of experiencing the development process from a few people to more than 1,000 people, and personally witnessed the key stages of the exploration, growth, breakthrough, reconstruction and innovation of iFLYTEK Research Institute in different periods.
In the new year and new era, iFLYTEK Research Institute will have the unshirkable responsibility to continue to move forward, solve major social needs with systematic innovation, and aspire to represent China as a world-class research institute. ”
In the future, iFLYTEK Research Institute will continue to deepen its cultivation, "use the right method and do useful research", and continue to promote intelligent voice and artificial intelligence to walk in the forefront of the world!
END