This article was jointly reported by China Net, Pencil Road and other media:
On March 31, Li Haizhou, the chief scientist of Kuaishangtong, was elected as an academician of the Singapore Academy of Engineering. Although Academician Li Haizhou has won many scientific research and academic honors before, he was very happy this time.
Founded in 2011, the Singapore Academy of Engineering is a national-level academic institution leading the development of engineering technology and the only engineering academy in a developed country in Southeast Asia. There are currently 133 academicians of the Singapore Academy of Engineering, who are recommended by universities, research institutes and industries every year, and selected through a very strict peer review and selection process.
Facing the honors he received, Academician Li Haizhou said: "Compared with purely academic research, I prefer and pay more attention to the realization of engineering projects, because they can change the world more intuitively. Becoming an academician of the Singapore Academy of Engineering is a great blessing to me. A general recognition of years of engineering achievements, so this is a special honor for me.
"Since becoming the chief scientist of Kuaishangtong, Academician Li Haizhou has led the Kuaishangtong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute to achieve a series of scientific research achievements in speech recognition, natural language processing, etc., and the research results have been presented at top international academic conferences for many times. The team under his guidance is actively promoting the construction and improvement of the Kuaishangtong AI PaaS open platform, laying a solid foundation for Kuaishangtong to realize the corporate vision of "serving 3 billion users with technology and products".
"Mr. Xiao and I have very consistent views on many issues." Talking about the opportunity to be the chief scientist of Kuaishangtong, Academician Li Haizhou said this.
As one of the most forward-looking scholars with the most abundant academic achievements in the field of language and speech processing, Academician Li Haizhou has always insisted on practical research as the main direction during his decades of scientific research.
The introduction of Professor Li Haizhou by the Singapore Academy of Engineering in the newsletter announcing the newly elected academicians
Academician Li Haizhou has unique insights into speech and language technology. He believes that speech and language are unique communication tools for human beings, and technology must serve the public and provide convenience for life. In the 1990s, he was engaged in research overseas. When the mainstream academic schools were studying English processing, he had already devoted himself to the research of Chinese processing. In 1998, he advocated and hosted the first International Conference on Chinese Spoken Language Processing in Singapore. For more than 30 years, Academician Li has not only made outstanding achievements in the research of English processing, but also completed the research of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian languages and Indian language processing, bringing speech and language technology to every corner of the world. In 2014, Academician Li was awarded the highest honor of IEEE Fellow for his outstanding contribution to multilingual speech and language processing.
Academician Li Haizhou realized very early on that if he wants to effectively promote the practical AI research of speech and language technology, he must join hands with enterprises. This is not only because the company can provide massive amounts of real data needed for research, but also matches his concept of a "gearbox" for corporate scientific research. An enterprise is like a "gearbox" composed of multiple gears of different sizes. The largest gear in the middle represents scientific research. Although it rotates slowly, it has great power and can drive many The small gear rotates rapidly.
In 2016, Academician Li Haizhou met Xiao Longyuan, the founder of Kuaishangtong, during the exchange with the industry. On the one hand, Kuaishangtong has a dialogue system that has been applied, as well as a large user base and practical data, and the investment in scientific research is rare in China. On the other hand, Xiao Longyuan always believes that AI technology is the core productivity in the era of digital economy, and the importance of data as a factor of production will continue to rise in the era of digital economy. Kuaishangtong, which already has hundreds of thousands of customers and a large amount of voice and language data, must pay attention to the power of scientific research if it wants to develop in a long-term and healthy way. At the customer level, it will use AI technology to drive data elements to lead the business and create greater value. ; At the social level, for the comprehensive and in-depth development of the digital economy, it belongs to Kuaishangtong. And this is just complementary to Academician Li Haizhou's scientific research concept of "using demand to drive the progress of scientific research".
Taking this as an opportunity, Academician Li Haizhou established a research cooperation relationship with Kuaishangtong, and served as the chief scientist of Kuaishangtong, mainly leading the work of Kuaishangtong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. Someone once said that scientists can make two attempts in order to continuously make research breakthroughs: one is to work with very young people, and the other is to find a very inspiring new working environment. Academician Li Haizhou found the answer in Kuaishangtong.
In the view of academician Li Haizhou, the scientific research management of "gearbox", the scientific research concept of "using demand to drive the progress of scientific research" and the talent policy of "reducing talents without sticking to one pattern" are the secrets of the success of Kuaishangtong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute.
After leading Kuaishangtong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute to complete a number of technological breakthroughs such as the reconstruction of the underlying logic of intelligent dialogue robots, Academician Li Haizhou is currently guiding the team to build an intelligent language model that can support multiple downstream tasks to support dialogue systems, Various application methods including personalized recommendation, machine translation, and text analysis, and general language models applicable to different fields.
"The usual practice of developing commercial dialogue systems is to create a specific language model for a specific domain to meet the needs. When changing application scenarios or downstream tasks, a new model has to be rebuilt, which leads to a long landing cycle. , and it is difficult to realize the accumulation of technology.” Academician Li Haizhou hopes that the application of the general intelligent language model can change the current development process, make the language model have the ability to learn and accumulate, and realize one-to-many task support.
Currently, Kuaishangtong AI PaaS open platform is gradually taking shape under the guidance of Academician Li Haizhou. Academician Li Haizhou introduced: "In the Kuaishangtong AI PaaS open platform, the intelligent human-machine dialogue open platform, voice and voiceprint technology platform, and natural language processing platform are relatively mature and complete, and have been widely used in the industry. Others such as The brain computing platform, knowledge graph platform, and big data analysis platform are also being continuously optimized."
In addition, another key research direction of Kuaishangtong Artificial Intelligence Research Institute - a large number of research results of multilingual speech and language processing have also been applied to Kuaishangtong AI PaaS open platform, which naturally has a "global vision" .
At present, Kuaishangtong has launched an AI SaaS intelligent enterprise service system based on the AI PaaS open platform developed by the research institute, including intelligent customer service systems, marketing robots, and SCRM systems. In many fields such as medical beauty, education, and home furnishing, It has been recognized by more than 380,000 enterprise or organizational users. At the same time, Kuaishangtong is also actively promoting the ecological construction around the Kuaishangtong AI PaaS open platform, hoping that through the direct application of the platform by developers and enterprise users, they can use this platform to do tasks that could not be achieved before, and then help Intelligent digital upgrade process in multiple fields and industries.
Academician Li Haizhou believes that voice and language technology is the foundation of the AI PaaS open platform, and the AI PaaS open platform is the guarantee of Kuaishangtong's competitiveness in the next decade. A general and open AI platform is the most important trend in the commercialization of the entire intelligent dialogue field, and it is also the key to ensure that Kuaishangtong's vision of "serving 3 billion users" is not just a slogan. By creating an AI PaaS open platform that can meet the needs of a large number of different tasks and serve multiple languages, people with various needs around the world can feel the convenience brought by AI technology. This is another major engineering practice of Academician Li in the engineering of speech and language technology.