Some historical conversions of China may resonate with each other, while others may pass by. This is not what I said, but what the Supreme leader said at the conference of Academicians of the two Houses of Congress.
If China once missed the great leap of the industrial revolution, then today again ushered in the crucial historical convergence of the intelligent revolution. To achieve “co-frequency resonance”, what direction should the engineering science community take and what should it do? On November 8, the Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award, known as “the highest award in China’s engineering science and technology field”, was announced in Beijing. This award is a true reflection of the power of engineering and scientists. As we all know, the Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award honors Chinese engineering and technology experts who have made important contributions and made outstanding achievements in the field of engineering science and technology and engineering management. For example, Academician Peng Shilu, one of the pioneers and founders in the field of nuclear power in China, is the winner of this Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award.
The Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Special Contribution Award was awarded to all the academicians of the Department of Medicine and Health of the Chinese Academy of Engineering who have made significant contributions to the fight against the epidemic. The remaining 39 experts, including Jiang Zhuangde, an expert in mechanical engineering, Li Tianchu, an expert in metrology, Wang Haifeng, an expert in artificial intelligence, and Zhou Shaoxiong, an expert in special functional metal materials, have also made outstanding achievements in their respective fields. Among them, Wang Haifeng, CTO of Baidu, also became the first scientist in the AI industry to win this award for his outstanding contributions in the field of artificial intelligence, especially in the field of natural language processing. Now artificial intelligence is bringing about the fourth round of industrial revolution in human history. In this special historical period, what have Wang Haifeng and Baidu done and what heights will AI lead to?
From the ivory tower to the podium
If you know something about the field of AI, you must have heard of Wang Haifeng. He began to study natural language processing and machine translation in the 1990s when he was a student at Harbin University of Technology. Wang joined Baidu in 2010 and joined the AI industry. His personal experience also represents the development of AI in China over the past three decades. Simply being “at the same time” as the development of artificial intelligence in the timeline clearly does not explain why Wang Haifeng won the Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award.
To answer this question, it comes back to the logic of the prize itself: the candidates are valued first and foremost for their expertise in the field of academic research.
In both academia and industry, Wang Haifeng has achieved world-class academic achievements. For example, I led the Baidu research team to break through large-scale high-quality translation knowledge acquisition technology, multi-task learning methods, etc., and won the second prize of National Science and Technology Progress; He became the first Chinese president of ACL, the most influential international academic organization in the field of natural language processing, in its 50-year history. Including more than 270 core AI capabilities opened by Baidu Brain, China’s first self-developed, open source deep learning platform Feizuo and so on, all of which were conquered by Wang Haifeng’s team.
Before “Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award”, he had already won the first National Innovation Award, the first Wu Wenjun Award for Outstanding Contribution to Artificial Intelligence, the title of “Young and Middle-aged Experts with Outstanding Contributions” and other honors. This award just shows that every achievement and every honor in the field of engineering science and technology is never due to luck and chance.
Secondly, it has made a significant contribution in industrial application.
Part of the “Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award” is also from the practice and transformation of scientific and technological innovation to the industrial end, which has released the value for the development and progress of Chinese society. After Wang Haifeng joined the industry, he led Baidu to open the road of industrial intelligent upgrading, which is the proof of the attribute of “Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award”.
After joining Baidu, what Wang Haifeng has done is to integrate cutting-edge AI technology with the industry. About four years in 2010 by the end of 2013, hai-feng wang led baidu team laid the AI all aspects of the foundation, the underlying technology research and development, such as natural language processing, machine translation, speech, vision, machine learning, deep learning, as well as data mining, knowledge map, conversational recommendation and so on various aspects of technological capabilities are springing up; From 2014 to 2017, Baidu search was upgraded intelligently. Around 2016 and 2017, AI gradually became an important strategy of Baidu. AI technology platform system was established, and a large number of mature AI capabilities applied inside Baidu began to be exported through Baidu Brain, flying paddle and so on. In 2019, Baidu AI and cloud business merged, AI through the cloud “highway” faster release to thousands of industries, technology-oriented Baidu has become an important pole of the smart economy. In this process, Wang Haifeng played an important role.
In addition, the contribution of the scientists to the country makes the Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award particularly different.
Wang Haifeng, who has become a Baidu executive, has never lost his scientistness. Baidu colleagues have been “teasing”, Wang Haifeng every day very early to the office; Wang Haifeng’s graduate students described him as someone who “didn’t miss a punctuation mark when revising his thesis”; Many academic talents, through Wang Haifeng, feel Baidu’s respect and sincerity for scientists and choose to join. The open and open source Baidu AI has promoted the process of industrial intelligence in China and broken the deadlock of China’s lack of its own deep learning framework for intellectual property rights. Wang Haifeng is behind it.
The connotation and extension of “Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Award” are derived from the integration of academic, application and ideal. From this perspective, all the winners of this year’s Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award, including 40 experts and one organization, deserve admiration and applause.
Baidu’s Way in the Age of Intelligence
All the glory is the past. As a scientist from the AI industry, Wang Haifeng’s award shows that in this round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, artificial intelligence has become a strategic technology driving development, and has begun to step into the spotlight of engineering science and technology stage. When the artificial intelligence machine wants to stand at the forefront of the tide forever and “resonate with the same frequency” in the historical intersection period, it is natural not to indulge in the existing achievements. Off the podium, one of the more well-known roles of Wang Haifeng is Baidu CTO. The technological value and driving force released from Baidu to the industry will become the key to the further development and roaring era of AI.
Where there is still room for transformation, Wang and Baidu will focus their attention next: on talent, for example. AI competition in the final analysis is a talent competition, directly related to the long-term reliability of the entire intelligent economy building. On this track, Baidu has made a lot of efforts to cultivate talents in industry and academia over the years through Baidu Research Institute, Huangpu Academy, AI Fast Track and other forms. In June this year, a further investment was made to train 5 million AI talents in the next five years, so as to provide AI talent guarantee for the development of China’s intelligent economy and intelligent society. In addition, the application transformation of AI to the industry is still in the early stages of development.
Although the term AI has been popular all over China, in fact, due to the scarcity of computing resources, the difficult transformation of traditional industries, the shortage of professionals and other practical problems, the landing scene of artificial intelligence is still limited, and the penetration rate of AI in enterprises is only 4%. In the face of this situation, Wang Haifeng has repeatedly mentioned that “artificial intelligence will enter the stage of industrial mass production and accelerate the pace of intelligent transformation of all walks of life”. In order to achieve this goal, Baidu also began to transform a variety of AI technologies and services into modularization, standardization and automation, in order to continuously reduce the use threshold and cost of AI, and support the intelligent needs of all walks of life.
The recognition of Guanghua Engineering and Technology Award recognizes not only the contributions of Wang Haifeng and Baidu in the field of AI; It also points out the future development direction of Chinese engineering science and technology. China has never missed the storm of science and technology, but also Wang Haifeng and a group of Chinese scientific and technological workers of the “original aspiration” and ideal. In this process, Baidu, which holds up the AI industry, has quietly harvested the rain and dew of The Times.
