Who is the best in the global competition of artificial intelligence research? On January 11th, Elsevier Group first interpreted its latest published artificial intelligence research report in China.According to the report, artificial intelligence research has grown rapidly in the past five years (2013-2017) at a rate of nearly 13% per year. China, the United States and India have become the countries with the most research output in artificial intelligence.
The report entitled "Artificial Intelligence: Creation, Transfer and Application of Knowledge" shows that the number of articles published in the field of artificial intelligence in China ranked first in the world in 2017. If the current momentum is maintained, China is expected to catch up Europe in four years. .
Transcripts of Chinese, American and European
The report focuses on the current state of artificial intelligence research in China, Europe and the United States.If the focus is on it, it is: China is developing rapidly and output first, and will become a global leader in this field;The field of European research is diverse, but the top scientific research personnel are slowly outflowing; the United States is in a leading position in the global field of artificial intelligence, and its performance is outstanding.
According to the report, the number of published and quoted artificial intelligence papers in China are increasing, and the growth rate is comparable to the growth rate of global artificial intelligence research (13%), especially in the two fields of computer vision and fuzzy systems.The data shows that in the past three years, the number of artificial intelligence talents attracted by Chinese academic circles is far more than the number of lost talents. The research environment in China is becoming more and more attractive, and the influence of citations is increasing.
Europe is the largest and most diverse region for artificial intelligence research, and the proportion and growth rate of international cooperation with Europe is also high.However, in recent years, Europe has faced the serious problem of the loss of top artificial intelligence talent.
Unlike Europe, the US industry has a strong appeal to local and global artificial intelligence talent.American companies have attracted many AI talents, and their scientific research strength is due to the tradition of establishing a joint laboratory across borders.American academics have also performed well, with outstanding performance in academic production and retention of talent.The United States is in a leading position in the global field of artificial intelligence competition, and its research field is not as diverse as Europe, but far better than China.
What shortcomings should China make up?
“Despite the rapid growth of Chinese scientific research, the impact of citation in this field is still low, indicating that Chinese research seems to be more regional, not global.”The report also pointed out the problems in the development of artificial intelligence in China, such as the low level of international cooperation and the low mobility of researchers.
“The international model of mobility and cooperation shows that China’s research work in the field of artificial intelligence is relatively isolated,” said Maria de Klein, senior vice president of analysis services at Elsevier.
"At present, the authoritative academic conferences and academic organizations in the field of artificial intelligence in the world are mainly dominated by Europe and the United States. The academic originality and international influence of China's scientific research have obvious shortcomings.And there is less interaction with industry, academia and research between international AI technology giants and top academic institutions, and cooperation with large companies such as Google and Amazon is not particularly large.”Sun Zhenan, a researcher at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a professor at the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Technology at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that although the internationalization of Chinese academics, talents and industries is becoming more and more obvious,however, efforts should be made to further integrate into the international mainstream academic circle, industrial ecology and social media.
According to the report, China's artificial intelligence research focuses on computer vision, and has not yet published large-scale research on natural language processing and knowledge representation including speech recognition.This is because such research subjects are enterprises and usually do not pay attention to publishing academic papers.
"China's current research is aimed at the industrial application prospects and good industry direction. More than 60% of AI startups focus on computer vision, and research and development are mostly application-driven.On the one hand, we have a larger user base and accumulated a large amount of data, and the application basic research driven by application scenarios such as face recognition, speech recognition, and text recognition is at the forefront;On the other hand, objectively speaking, basic research still has a large gap from the top national level. There are not many high-cited papers in the new concept, and there are few original influence-oriented major influence results. Said Sun Zhenan.
Sun Zhenan introduced that European and American researchers have more scientific research and patience. Many of them are free explorations driven by personal interests. Some research institutions dare to succumb to hard bones. The government also supports cutting-edge research such as brain intelligence integration and general artificial intelligence.These explorations may not return in the short term, but once there is a breakthrough, they will produce significant output and explode.He said that at present, China is also deploying cutting-edge research and supplementing the shortcomings of basic research by releasing a new generation of artificial intelligence development planning, funding basic innovation research projects, and encouraging cooperation between industry, universities and research institutes.