Shanghai AI Talk 2022: Changes in the Digital Intelligence of Economy  

On the morning of April 22nd, Shanghai AI Talk was successfully held at Zhejiang University. This time, we invited Pan Yunhe, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor at Zhejiang University, to give a lecture entitled "Changes in the Digital Intelligence of Economy".

This session of AI TALK is organized by Shanghai AI Lab and Global Artificial Intelligence Academic Alliance (GAIAA), and co-organized by the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Zhejiang University, Information Technology Center of Zhejiang University, Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University, SenseTime, and Shanghai GAIAA Academic Development Center. Professor Wu Fei, a member of the Strategy Executive Committee of GAIAA, Executive Vice President of the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study, Zhejiang University, and Director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University, was the host. The whole event was supported by Tencent Video and Bilibili. The lecture attracted a total of over 150,000 online attendees in a live broadcast.

Artificial intelligence as a strategic technology and a vital driving force is leading a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, which will bring about great changes in economic structure and society via empowering productivity improvement, the generation of new business models, and industrial optimization and upgrading.

Academician Pan Yunhe believes that human beings are undergoing a revolution in the technological industry, namely, the digital intelligence change in the CPH (cyber-physical-human system) triad space. However, during this digital and intelligent transformation, what changes will occur in various aspects related to the economy? Pan brings a wonderful explanation of this issue from the following three dimensions:

A New Round of Transformation in Technological Industry: Digital and Intelligent Transformation

 The technological and industrial transformation we are currently experiencing is the fourth major change in human history, having assets, data, knowledge, computing power, algorithms, and platforms as its core and based on data knowledge, computing power, and algorithms (models).

 Five Trends in Digital Intelligence for Businesses and Markets

1. Companies start to provide digital and intelligent products. They are adding digital and intelligent components to their products for sale, which gradually leads to product differentiation.

2. Companies start to use data massively. Unlike other resources, most of which tend to reduce with use, data is something that will multiply with more use. It is a time when data is given unprecedented priority. More data is enabling companies to develop both deeply and widely. The data gathered by companies can help to form a platform of big data, thus promoting the company to carry out production and management transformation with higher efficiency.

3. The Internet and big data are further promoting the development of personalized manufacturing and services. In the past, the only way of business is to sell products in physical stores, but now you can see the sales behavior of almost all kinds of industries on the Internet. Enterprises can get the user's big data through online sales and use it to predict the fashion mode in the future. Then they will make a quick designso that the customers can try the clothes on immediately. After that, those enterprises are to provide personalized services, thus forming intelligent manufacturing. What is mentioned above is a very ideal chain of personalized production.

4. The intelligentization of online custom design is being carried out widely. Through the artificial intelligence automatic design system, it is possible to quickly complete an advertisement that integrates all advertising elements such as video, text, and music, thus effectively solving marketing problems.

5. Digital platforms are emerging on a massive scale. The development of these platforms is accelerating in the context of the new digital era. The development of mobile Internet has made Internet access ubiquitous, allowing people to be connected virtually no matter where they are, and wireless connectivity has inspired the rapid rise, development, and use of platforms. We can see that digital platforms are dramatically changing the current industrial form, such as transactional digital platforms, social digital platforms, and innovative platforms.

 Career Development in the Changing Face of Digital Intelligence

1. The market is in urgent need of talents who can master digital intelligence technologies, explore industry needs, as well as design algorithms and systems to solve problems. Key research areas include machine learning, big data, biometrics, computer vision, and robotics. In addition, there is another category of talent that will receive increasing attention—amateur developers, who make software in a shared platform or transfer those being made to the platform, which will be an important development model and will be the main development direction in the future.

2. With the application of programs and software becoming more and more widespread, the market needs more talents who can provide professional services with software, which will bring a wider market space and an innovative enterprise business model. Each digital platform forms an ecology that integrates various businesses such as finance, logistics, sales, and advertising design. This requires not only technical talents, but also those who understand professional services.

3. Some occupations have been eliminated in the trend of digitalization and intelligence, but we must also see that many new occupations will be created in this process. These new jobs are all related to data, including data managing, data processing, data cleaning, data center management, etc. A huge change is taking place in the entire job market. This change is not just about reducing the number of people. Many smart companies are transforming people—shifting employees to digital businesses gradually.

We also invited Mr. Wei Zhongyu, a Knowledge Promoter from Tencent Video and a professor from the School of Data Science, Fudan University, and Zhihuijun (Peng Zhihui), one of Bilibili 2021 Top 100 Content Creators and Huawei Ascend R&D engineer. They exchanged their opinions with Academician Pan. Besides that, the members of the observation group asked questions from the aspects of the main differences between AI 2.0 and 1.0 in terms of computing power, metaverse technology, and how universities can better meet the needs of the development of economic digital intelligence in terms of personnel training.

For more information about this talk, please click the following link:  https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1iY411A7uA/