The Zhejiang Lab and AAAS partnered to highlight the latest advances
driving intelligent computing through a series of lectures and a new journal,
Intelligent Computing.On November 16, 2021, more than 10,000 people worldwide viewed the
“Innovation Forum on Intelligent Computing” online, which took place at the
Zhejiang Lab in Hangzhou, China. This research institute was established
in 2017 by the Zhejiang Provincial Government, Zhejiang University, and
Alibaba Group. Cosponsored by the Zhejiang Lab, Science, and Science
Robotics, the forum consisted of presentations from computer science and
artificial intelligence (AI) experts from across the globe. The presenters
focused on this targeted theme: computing for and by intelligence.
In his opening remarks, Shiqiang Zhu, president of the Zhejiang Lab,
stated, “Driven by burgeoning technological and industrial revolutions,
human society is advancing toward an intelligent era where everything
can be digitalized.” That transition depends on a cluster of recent advances
in computing. “Artificial intelligence has become a leading technology in
global tech innovation, with algorithms, data, and computational power
as its three pillars,” Zhu noted. “In particular, intelligent computing has
become a primary booster for the development of AI.”
But as Zhu explained, despite these advances, intelligent computation
faces many difficulties, including a growing demand for computational
power and its enormous energy requirements. “Our goal is to bring
[scientists] together to confront the huge challenges we face as a society,
and explore the limits of science, thereby setting and leading the trends of
intelligent computing in the future,” Zhu said.
Keeping track of those trends requires the collaboration of experts
around the world. “We believe in science without borders,” said Bill Moran,
publisher, Science family of journals, Science/AAAS. “We believe in scienceadvancing society.” In considering this partnership between the Zhejiang
Lab and AAAS, he asked: “How can intelligent computing serve science
and advance society?”
Answering that question will be one of the goals of the Science Partner
Journal (SPJ) program’s Intelligent Computing—a new peer-reviewed
journal that was launched during a signing ceremony at the forum; it
will be published through a partnership between the Zhejiang Lab and
Science/AAAS. Speaking of the new journal, Moran added: “Part of our goal
is to work with other scientific societies and research centers to share our
knowledge and our expertise in peer-reviewed publishing.”From the “miracle year” to now
In the forum, scientists discussed the current state of intelligent
computing and its promise for the future. In the first keynote
presentation, Zhu said, “Intelligent computing is neither a substitute
for supercomputing or cloud computing, nor a simple integration
of existing computing. Instead, it is [defined as] the best way to use
computing resources and the most appropriate calculation method to
solve practical problems according to the needs of [a given] task.” Zhu
pointed out that intelligent computing “not only needs to make full use of
existing calculations and algorithms, but also promotes the formation of
new ones.” Consequently, he sees intelligent computing serving as the
foundational technology of a “smart” society.
In the second keynote speech, Hai Jin, chair professor of computer
science and engineering at Huazhong University of Science and
Technology, described the range of applications for graph computing.
Increasing the scale of data and working with increasingly diverse
applications creates the need to explore approaches to “the architecture,
memory, and algorithm levels,” he explained.Advertorial
Forum launches
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