At 19:00 on November 29, 2018, the 16th Session of CUFE-UnitedTogether “Drive Career Development of Business School • Lecture—Decode Growth Tips in the ‘AI’ Era” was heldsuccessfully at the Lecture Hall of Central University of Finance and Economics(CUFE). Mr. Ma Xiao, General Manager of iFLYTEK Consumer BG IntelligentAssistance Department, was invited to deliver an informative speech on themeslike “What is AI?”, “What is the status quo of AI?”, and “How will AI beachieved?”. The Lecture was presided over by Yang Peipei from MBAP5, Class2018, CUFE.

A scene from the event

Host: Yang Peipei fromMBAP5, Class 2018, CUFE

Guest speaker: Mr. MaXiao, General Manager of iFLYTEK Consumer BG Intelligent Assistance Department

Ma Xiao shared his opinions about five “Ws” of AI, namely, “what,where, how, when and who” in his lecture. For starters, Ma gave a briefintroduction to the development of AI and three waves in its history. As hesaid, “In 1956, a summer workshop was held in Dartmouth, the US, where theconcept of AI was brought forward. AI is an artificial program or system withperception, cognition, decision-making and execution abilities like humanbeings.” Then, Ma went on to distinguish a series of concepts, including“strong and weak AI,” “AI threat theories and AI rational theories,” and “AIand robots.”

“What is the status quo of AI?” asked Ma. According to him,computational intelligence, perceptional intelligence, sports intelligence, andcognitive intelligence has emerged in the AI era, but they were just the startof AI development, which would continue to evolve in the future. As to how toachieve AI, Ma proposed three routes, namely deep neural networks (DNN), wholebrain simulation, and intelligence dynamics. He stressed that the combinationof DNN and big data has become mainstream. Meanwhile, closed-loop optimizationof “research-engineering-product-user” based on the internet and mobileinternet has accelerated iterative optimization. Then, he cited and analyzedseveral cases like iFLYTEK Super Brain, medical imaging, humanoid questionanswering robots, and the world’s first robot to pass the national medicallicensing examination.

Q & A session

After the speech followed a Q & A session, where Ma answeredquestions raised by students one by one.

Souvenir presentation

(From left to right:Rong Qiwen, Ma Xiao, and Zhao Yingfan)

Group photo