Recently, at the Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Conference held in Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City, experts from all over the world discussed the industry of artificial intelligence. Many experts believe that the intelligent manufacturing industry should combine "intelligence" and "manufacturing" together.

(Photo via Tan Yunfeng)

"Flexibility" is the advantage of intelligent manufacturing

“During the epidemic, the priority of enterprises has changed. The management of risk safety has become the top priority.” Chen Huaiyu, IBM's global vice president, said that after the outbreak, IBM received five corporate consultation calls in a week asking how to bring the production business online, and then a number of questions such as how to transfer data and how to ensure the security of online communication among customers gradually increased.

"A major feature of intelligent manufacturing is that it can realize ‘flexible’ production, which enables enterprises to rebuild personalized production lines in a short period of time, and promote the rapid updating and iteration of a product," said Wang Yaonan, the supervisor of Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence and professor of Hunan University.

Logistics robots switched to disinfection robots in a short period of time and were used for disinfection by many large hospitals. The original pharmaceutical production line quickly adjusted its production and produced vaccines on a large scale. There are a series of production adjustments realized by Academician Wang Yaonan's team using the "flexibility" of intelligent production lines since the outbreak. Academician Wang Yaonan said that in the future, intelligent manufacturing robots will continue to develop in the direction of intelligence, flexibility, and collaboration.

(Photo via Tan Yunfeng)

Sharing and collaboration is the key to intelligent transformation

"The investment of millions or even hundreds of millions of yuan is not affordable for most small and medium-sized enterprises." In the opinion of Academician Wang Yaonan, intelligent manufacturing is complex engineering, which requires a lot of capital and labor. However, small and medium-sized enterprises generally lack information technology foundation, information talents, entrepreneurs, and management teams who understand information technology, so it is difficult to carry out intelligent transformation. Therefore, sharing and collaboration have become the keywords in the process of intelligent transformation.

In recent years, the development of intelligent manufacturing in Zhejiang has shown a strong trend. In the future, Zhejiang will give full play to the first-mover advantage of the digital economy, aim at cutting-edge fields, and make coordinated development in technical theory research, application innovation, global development cooperation, and industrial ecological construction, and strive to make itself a province of artificial intelligence innovation and development.

（Photo via Wang Ximing）

Letting AI learn to understand human is the trend of development

Alan Kay, the winner of the Turing Prize in 2003, said at the recent Beijing Zhiyuan Conference that a complex machine learning system is like a "super pigeon", which can do many useful things. However, researchers in the field of machine learning cannot use the progress in this sub-field to flaunt the success of the whole field of artificial intelligence. If researchers want to invent AI systems that can interact with human beings naturally, they must let AI learn to understand the human context and common sense. This is the development trend of artificial intelligence technology.

"Only when the transformation from ‘deep learning’ to “deep understanding” is realized can artificial intelligence be more widely and deeply applied in the field of intelligent manufacturing in the future." Professor Zhang Lihua, vice president of Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University, said that from a micro perspective, making artificial intelligence more "intelligent" and making machines more intelligent and flexible in decision-making and judgment like human beings is a key point to solve the problem of industrial intelligent transformation.

(Compiled by Xu Yuhong, translated by Tao Mingzhou)