Along with artificial intelligence (AI) products represented by AlphaGo becoming increasingly popular, building standards for AI industry is concerned by the market. The building of China’s AI standard system is promoted now, which will focus on online service platform of AI and automatic grading of AI products, reported by Economic Information Daily. A dozen of most representative aspects such as intelligent loudspeaker box, intelligent customer service, intelligent wearable products and intelligent robot are chosen for intelligent grading of AI products and corresponding valuation indicators are set up to provide industrial development with scientific and effective evaluation basis.
“Two weeks ago, we invited more than 10 industrial leaders like Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, Beijing Linlong Technology Co., Ltd. (a joint-venture company established by Iflytek Co., Ltd. and JD.com), Beijing Sound Connect Technology Co., Ltd., ROOBO, Lenovo and China Unicom to jointly join in research on evaluation of intelligent loudspeaker box, which remarked the start of this evaluation project.” Cao Feng, engineer from China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), introduced to the reporter that the intelligent grading project of AI products will build corresponding methods and indicators for evaluation on AI products or services including intelligent wearable products, intelligent robot, and IPTV set top box (STB).
The so-called intelligent grading refers to evaluation on intelligence of AI products. Taking intelligent loudspeaker box for instance, the evaluation on its intelligence level will be testing its sensory ability and interaction ability under different application scenarios.
“Establishing a system evaluating intelligent grading aims to have objective and fair evaluation on AI projects with various types and abilities and offer different grading based on evaluation results so as to set standards on productions and services of the industry and provide users with credible reference,” said Cao Feng.
AI has drawn much attention from the market and seen rapid development, and significant breakthrough has been made in auto driving, voice and image identification, translation and other fields in recent years. However, as an emerging industry, AI development lags behind in terms of its standards and evaluation system. At present, there’re no corresponding industry standards and evaluation standards at home and abroad. For example, the industrial leaders took the lead in formulating standards about AI’s application in household appliances and other enterprises joined in it. But there’s problem in interest allocation in smart home sector.
“At present, most smart TVs in the market are not truly intelligent, or their intelligence level is very low. They just realize control via mobile phone and content sharing through Internet without many intelligent changes in experiences. Manufacturers fight on their own and want to make the standards. Users have to download one more APP when they buy one intelligent product, which is quite troublesome,” an e-commerce staff told the reporter.
With the rapid development of AI, setting industrial standards become a key to its sustainable development. The country formulated a three-year implementation plan on “Internet plus” AI in last May. It proposed to build basic resources and innovation platform for AI and basically finish establishing AI industry system, innovative service system and standardization system by 2018. It was specified in the plan that the industry should set up integrated standard system of AI field, build and perfect technical standards on interconnection, industrial application, Internet security and privacy protection, and valuate intelligence level of AI system. It should reinforce network, software and hardware, data, system, and testing of some sectors like smart home, intelligent vehicle, intelligent robot and intelligent wearable devices, and ensure coordination and fair competition of AI industry to facilitate sound development of the industry.
The State Council issued development planning on the new generation of AI on July 20. It pointed out problems existing in China’s AI industry and drew out specified schedule and roadmap for China’s AI planning. By 2020, total technology and application of China’s AI should reach the world’s advanced level; AI technology standard, service system and industrial ecologic chain should be initially completed; market size of core sector of AI should be more than 150 billion yuan, driving that of related sectors to be over 1 trillion yuan.
It is learnt that under instruction of the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, CAICT took the lead in establishing Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA). One of the functions of the AIIA is to build evaluation brand and system for AI technologies, products and services, study method and standards on evaluating the technologies, products and services, and carry out the evaluation and certification.
“At current development stage, government, enterprises and research institutions hope to resolve the industry’s outstanding problems through industrial platform.” Cao disclosed that intelligent grading of AI products by AIIA aims to set up a set of effective evaluation standards specific to various intelligent devices with different performance indicators and user experience. “Evaluation framework for intelligent loudspeaker box has been started and the finalized form may be rolled out in the first quarter of next year,” Cao added.
Translated by Vanessa Chen
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