role in helping doctors make quicker and more accurate judgements.
In addition, AI could also play a significant role in long-distance
medical checkups and diagnoses. For example, in impoverished and
remote areas, many people are unable to access timely treatment and
AI could manage preliminary diagnosis before securing the long dis-
tance medical resources for patients.
AI can also help to improve the management of chronic diseases.
After being discharged from hospital, patients with chronic diseases
need to take medicines to recover and AI could play a role in monitor-
ing and managing the lives of patients. Aging is emerging as a prob-
lem in many countries, and it has become an urgent issue to take care
of elderly people. AI offers a variety of choices to take care of seniors.
CR: In AI research, is there a difference between academia and in-
dustry?
LFF: In the process of R&D, both academia and industry have
played a crucial role especially for the cutting-edge science and tech-
nology of AI. The main purpose of academia is to cultivate students.
As a professor, my own work centres not only on scientific innova-
tion but also on the delivery of knowledge, which is a crucial value
of academia.
Another issue is that in academia, more attention is paid to fun-
damental research. There is great potential for the development of
AI and sometimes it takes a short time for research findings to be
developed into products, just like deep learning. Sometimes, however,
it takes a much longer time for the transformation. For example, sci-
entists spent more than 20 years researching the field before inventing
the machine learning algorithms. It requires great patience and fore-
sight to conduct fundamental research. In industry, however, product
creation is the priority.
CR: How can academia and industry cooperate to boost AI devel-
opment?
LFF: AI is a great driving force for the fourth industrial revolution.
This is a great chance for partnership but it needs careful thought
about the best ways to cooperate. I ventured into the AI industry
through the Google platform because cloud computing has a great
impact on many fields. What I want to do most is to apply AI to the
fields that the general public need most rather than simply drawing
up blueprints.
CR: How do you see the recent AI start-up boom?
LFF: It’s a chicken-and-egg situation; what is important for entre-
preneurs is to pinpoint the products they want to make and find the
solutions to the problem either through AI or other technical means.
It is the only way to make products popular in the market. AI is only
a tool and our goal is to use the tool to solve problems.CR: Can you give a glimpse of AI development in China?
LFF: AI belongs to engineering and science where the level of
scholarship is very important. China is home to many talented scien-
tists who are involved in the field, for example in aspects of computer
vision. China has been closely following trends and development of
new technology but there is a long way to go for China to lead global
research. In my opinion, the most important yardstick to measure the
scientific level of a country or a research group is its capacity to guide
the development of the entire field.
China has great zeal and investment as well as government support
in AI. China’s academic circle and students have a great background
in mathematics and engineering and both the academia and indus-
trial circle have provided a great platform for students. I expect that
China will leap forward after it has accumulated more experience and
will become a trailblazer in the field of AI.Li Fei-Fei, chief scientist of AI/ML for cloud services at Google, speaks during
the company’s Cloud Next ‘17 event in San Francisco, California, US,
March 8, 2017. The conference brings together industry experts to discuss
the future of cloud computingPhoto by cfp