The Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Harbin Institute of Technology unveiled the high-end forum of ＂Creating the Future with Wisdom＂.

News from Harbin Institute of Technology (Liu Peixiang/Wen Liqi, Sun Zhuo/Photo) On the morning of May 5, the unveiling ceremony of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Harbin Institute of Technology and the high-end forum on "Creating the Future with Wisdom" were held in the Science Park International Conference Center. Li Mingchun, Deputy Secretary-General of Heilongjiang Provincial Government, and Xiong Sihao, Executive Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee of Heilongjiang University, delivered speeches at the meeting and unveiled the Institute. Vice President Han Jiecai presided over the unveiling ceremony.

Li Mingchun said in his speech that the establishment of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence is another important measure for Harbin Institute of Technology to embody "the first source of technological innovation in Longjiang" and help the revitalization and development of Longjiang. Science and technology make the nation prosperous, and science and technology make the country strong. The Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee and the provincial government have always insisted on promoting local economic development with scientific and technological innovation, thoroughly implemented the spirit of the important instructions of the Supreme Leader General Secretary when he visited Heilongjiang Province, constantly strengthened the construction of innovation ability, strengthened the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and regarded the artificial intelligence industry as an important field to cultivate new economic growth points. At the beginning of this year, Heilongjiang Province issued the "Three-year Special Action Plan for Artificial Intelligence Industry", hoping to promote the industrialization of artificial intelligence by strengthening the construction of artificial intelligence innovation ability and realize the coordinated development of innovation chain’s industrial chain and value chain. Over the years, Harbin Institute of Technology has been deeply rooted in Longjiang, making great contributions to China’s national defense and aerospace industry and national economic construction, and has achieved a number of major achievements with international leading level. It is also one of the earliest universities in China to carry out artificial intelligence research. The provincial party committee and government will fully support the development of the research institute, hoping that the research institute will carry out solid and effective work in artificial intelligence basic theory research, core key technology research, support platform construction, innovative application and industrial development, and produce fruitful results as soon as possible.

In his speech, Xiong Sihao reviewed the development of artificial intelligence in the world and China, and introduced the unremitting exploration in the field of artificial intelligence in our school for many years, especially a series of widely used achievements in the fields of handwritten text image recognition, sentence-level pinyin input method, machine translation, and a large number of outstanding talents delivered by our school for the field of artificial intelligence. He said that with the emergence of technologies such as deep learning, artificial intelligence has entered a new stage of development, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence in the future will profoundly change human social life and change the world. In 2017, the State Council officially released the Development Plan of New Generation Artificial Intelligence, and the provincial party committee and government also put forward clear hopes for the establishment of an artificial intelligence research institute. The school attaches great importance to the development of artificial intelligence, actively responds to the national deployment and local needs, seizes the major strategic opportunity of the development of artificial intelligence, and establishes an artificial intelligence research institute to support scientific research in the field of artificial intelligence. The research institute will fully integrate the superior resources inside and outside the school, break down the barriers between departments in the campus, promote the development of interdisciplinary integration, and deeply integrate with the industry, and strive to build a domestic first-class and internationally influential specialized research institution of artificial intelligence, making greater contributions to Longjiang’s economic development and national scientific and technological progress.

Academician Gao Wen, director of the Academic Committee of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence and alumnus, delivered a video speech to congratulate the establishment of the Institute, and hoped that Harbin Institute of Technology would continue to play a leading role in the field of artificial intelligence and provide a platform for young talents to devote themselves to artificial intelligence research; I also hope that young scholars will actively carry out cutting-edge, innovative and leading research to promote the innovative development of China’s artificial intelligence industry. Wang Haifeng, vice president of Baidu and president of Baidu Research Institute, Bill F. Spencer Jr of Illinois State University at Urbana-Champaign, and Professor Dang Jianwu of Tianjin University delivered speeches at the meeting.

In order to better unite the wisdom of experts, scholars and representatives of industrial enterprises, gather wisdom to tackle key problems, offer suggestions and suggestions, and jointly promote the rapid development of the Institute, the Institute has set up an academic committee. Academician Gao Wen served as the director of the academic membership association. From IBM and Microsoft, the first batch of national artificial intelligence open innovation platforms Baidu, Ali, Tencent and Iflytek, as well as famous experts, scholars and industry leaders from famous universities and research institutions at home and abroad, such as the United States, Germany, Canada and Hong Kong, China, served as members of the Academic Committee. At the meeting, Xiong Sihao presented letters of appointment to members of the academic committee.

After the establishment of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, it will be established in eight directions according to four levels: theory, technology, platform and application, artificial intelligence foundation and machine learning, intelligent control theory, brain science and brain-like intelligence, machine perception and pattern recognition, natural language processing and knowledge engineering, hybrid enhanced intelligence, autonomous intelligence and artificial intelligence applications (including intelligent manufacturing, intelligent civil engineering, intelligent finance and business, intelligent pension, intelligent remote sensing, etc.). The first batch of 30 researchers will be stationed in the research institute, focusing on a group of outstanding young and middle-aged scholars in the field of artificial intelligence in the school. Facing the development of artificial intelligence science, technology and industry, the research institute will gather first-class research teams, create first-class research results, train first-class scientific and technological talents and build a world-class artificial intelligence innovation base.

At the high-end artificial intelligence forum of "Creating the Future with Wisdom", Zhang Tong, director of Tencent’s artificial intelligence laboratory, Shen Xiaowei, global vice president of IBM, president of IBM China Research Institute and chief technology officer of IBM Greater China, Zhang Jianwei, director of the Institute of Multimodal Technology of Hamburg University in Germany, academician of Hamburg Academy of Sciences in Germany, vice president of Microsoft Asia Research Institute and alumnus Zhou Ming, president-elect of International Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL), respectively made "AI Industry Development and Tencent Practice" and "Anticipating the Innovation in the Age of Artificial Intelligence".

In the afternoon, the Academic Committee of the Institute held its first meeting to conduct in-depth discussions and exchanges on the future development and construction planning of the Institute.

Famous experts and scholars from home and abroad, representatives of industrial enterprises, leaders of relevant departments of provinces and cities, Xu Xiaofei, vice president of our school and president of Weihai Campus, heads of relevant units of our school, teachers and students of relevant colleges attended the unveiling ceremony and forum.