Few-Shot and Federated Learning Among Trending Topics Discussed at Top Chinese AI Conference Shibei·GMIS 2019

The Shibei·GMIS 2019 Global Machine Intelligence Summit, a top-tier Chinese artificial intelligence conference, took place July 19–20 at the Shanghai Marriott Hotel Parkview. The AI summit was hosted by Synced, a leading information service provider in the field of artificial intelligence, along with Shanghai Shibei Hi-Tech Park, in a joint effort with the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economic and Information (SHEITC) and Shanghai Jing’an District People’s Government.

Main forum speakers included Landing AI Founder Andrew Ng; Chief Lenovo AI Advisor and Scientific Director at DFKI Hans Uszkoreit; Chairman of IJCAI Qiang Yang; Jianyu Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; and HKUST Chair Professor and Founder of 4Paradigm Qiang Yang.

Founded in 2017, the GMIS is a Synced production with the theme of artificial intelligence and data science. GMIS 2017 was held in Beijing and drew over 3,000 attendees, featuring 32 presentations delivered by 47 artificial intelligence experts over its two-day run. Shibei·GMIS 2019 focused on academic research, technical engineering and industrial applications across artificial intelligence and big data.

2018 Turing Award Laureate and Scientific Director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms Yoshua Bengio sent a personal greeting to Shibei·GMIS 2019: “I am really glad to see the energy and the excitement around AI coming from China. The number of researchers and startups are going there. This is really good because we want to make sure the development of AI is happening all around the world.”

Junwei Zhu, deputy director of the Shanghai Big Data Center told the conference audience “The technological revolution led by big data and artificial intelligence is having a profound impact on society. The wave of data computing, powerful cloud computing, and self-learning machine algorithms have contributed to the current explosive growth of data technology in intelligent applications. Our lives are undergoing profound changes.”

Shibei·GMIS 2019 featured 24 presentations and two panels. The summit covered a wide range of topics such as cognitive intelligence, automated machine learning, natural language conversation, multi-modal intelligence, digital pilot, smart enterprise, infrastructure, etc.

Some quick takeaways from the summit:

• For the future development of artificial intelligence, Andrew Ng said he believes we should look forward to new algorithms that can take advantage of small data, such as few-shot learning.
• Qiang Yang suggested federated learning can overcome challenges of data islands, small data, and privacy issues.
• Hans Uszkoreit said in order to achieve AI capabilities beyond humans we need to leverage both rule-based systems and machine learning systems. He also stressed that the future AI will not be in the form of human intelligence — at least not the sort of super intelligence Elon Musk envisions.
• Senior Machine Learning Architect at 4Paradigm Wei-wei Tu said automated semi-supervised learning (AutoSSL) can automatically predict data annotation and achieve good training results.
• University of Oxford Professor Michael John Wooldridge said that to fully enable language understanding in machines they must understand common sense: “Deep learning is a big breakthrough, but it’s not really AI.”

Among this year’s GMIS attendees were top executives from Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and JD.com; as well as decision-making officers from the Shanghai Jing’an District People’s Government, Big Data Department of Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economic and Information, Zhejiang Province Administration of Big Data Development, Traffic Police Sub-Branch of the Public Security Bureau of Hangzhou, and the Alliance of Industrial Internet (AII).

About Synced

Synced (机器之心) was founded in March 2014 as the first Chinese media entity focusing solely on machine intelligence technologies. After five years of development, Synced has become a leading information service provider in the field of artificial intelligence, branching out with consulting, investment and data platform services.

About Shanghai Shibei Hi-Tech Park

The Shanghai Shibei High-Tech Park was founded in 1992 with a total planned area of 3.31 km2. It serves as an important supporting platform to connect Jing’an District with the Shanghai Technology Innovation Center. As a national demonstration model for transformation and upgrading in the Yangtze River Economic Zone, the Park has successfully transformed from a “traditional industrial park” to the “industrial base of cloud computing and big data of Shanghai”. The Park has become a priority area of the “3+5+X” project, with the mission of promoting the “Shanghai Made” brand.

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