Beijing, Dec 13 (AFP) Google announced today that it willopen a new artificial intelligence research centre in Beijing,tapping China's talent pool in the promising technologydespite the US search giant's exclusion from the country'sinternet.
Artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, hasbeen an area of intense focus for American tech stalwartsGoogle, Microsoft and Facebook, and their Chinese competitorsAlibaba, Tencent and Baidu as they bid to master what manyconsider is the future of computing.
AI research has the potential to boost developments inself-driving cars and automated factories, translationproducts and facial recognition software, among others.
Google's move to open a Beijing office focused onfundamental research is an indication of China's AI talent,widely seen as being neck-and-neck with the United States inresearch capability.
"Chinese authors contributed 43 per cent of all contentin the top 100 AI journals in 2015," Li Feifei, a researcherleading the new centre, wrote in a blog post on Google'swebsite.
"We've already hired some top experts, and will beworking to build the team in the months ahead."Li noted that Chinese engineers formed the backbones ofthe winning teams in the past three ImageNet Challenges, aninternational AI competition to test which computingtechnology is better at recognising and categorising pictures.
Chinese search engine Baidu's team was banned for a yearfor breaking the rules during the 2015 competition.
The country's large population and strong mathematics andsciences education has nurtured a slew of engineering talent.
Google operates two offices in China, with roughly halfof its 600 employees working on global products, said companyspokesman Taj Meadows.
Its job board in China shows about a dozen openings inthe AI field. The China centre will join Google's otherresearch facilities outside of its Silicon Valley hub,including in New York, Toronto, London and Zurich.
Google's search engine and many of its services areblocked by China's Great Firewall, but internet regulatorshave recently allowed access to its translation product, onethat has made leaps and bounds in accuracy by incorporatingthe company's AI research.(AFP)AMS.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.