“As China becomes a proving ground for AI technology, the world is paying attention. It may choose not to apply it in the same ways, but the world should certainly learn from it.”
China Region Special Section: Hot Topics – China’s Computing Ambitions
Communications of the ACM, November 2018, Vol. 61 No. 11, Pages 40-41
By Elliott Zaagman
China plans to become the world’s high-tech leader, and quickly. In 2015, the Chinese government’s State Council approved “Made in China 2025,” an initiative designed to position China as a world leader in fields such as robotics, aviation, advanced information technology, and new-energy vehicles in less than a decade. In support of this governmental initiative, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a three-year action plan to drive growth in areas including smart drones, facial recognition, AI-supported medical diagnosis, speech recognition, and language translation. If successful, the initiative would grow China’s AI industry to a size of $150 billion by 2020, approximately 100 times its size in 2016. As China pushes AI forward, here are a few names, trends, and technologies to watch.
