Zhu Pinpin: Making Robots with “Brains”

 

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Three important factors make a robot tick: moving, feeling and thinking. There are many intelligence problems to be solved in terms of moving, for example, self-balancing in kinematics. As regards feeling, voice recognition, face recognition and image recognition, all belong to emotional intelligence. Thinking is most important, and could be regarded as cognition intelligence, also the major research focus of Xiaoi.

“What we need to do is to add ‘brains’ to the robot hardware. To explain further, the core of thinking is knowledge, which supports thinking and which constitutes the biggest difference between humankind and animals. Humankind is capable of creating new knowledge and passing it down. This means that future generations will not need to obtain new knowledge through practice but education. Naturally, through constant expansion of knowledge, our thinking ability grows stronger and we become smarter.”

Technically speaking, is it possible for robots to undertake all repetitive work in daily life? Unfortunately it is not. It is possible for one robotic arm to conduct all the work on an assembly line, but not to serve at a restaurant. Although it seems simple, spacial movement is involved, which makes it no simpler than operating precise instruments.

Internationally, robots are divided into virtual and real ones. The core technology of Xiaoi is natural language understanding, which is motivated by a knowledge repository. Worth mentioning is that all technologies in this respect are self-developed by Xiaoi.

The domestic and international strategies for AI are the same. Compared to top players in the world, Chinese companies are still at primary stage in core technologies. But in some specialized fields some Chinese enterprises perform quite extraordinarily, and have caught up with the world leaders. Xiaoi, which is focused on natural language processing, and Deep Glint, which is dedicated to computer vision, are two such examples.

Of course, the development road for Xiaoi is not always smooth. Zhu says there are ups and downs all the way and new challenges are sure to arise. But Zhu, who started the enterprise even before college graduation, has persevered. The year 2009 was the hardest period. He paid his employees through taking out a private loan.

Also in that year, Xiaoi was undergoing a tough transition from dealing with individual customers to corporate customers. Zhu himself transformed from being buried in developing technologies to planning overall corporate development and dealing with customers.

 “Investors thought tinkering with company service was too slow, which led to a broken financial chain for some time.” During its toughest period, only 50 employees stayed with Xiaoi, but today the number has increased to 500.

Zhu said, “Looking back, we can see that innovation is a systematic project. It is not about just an idea or technologies, but also customer service and business operation.” The age of the people responsible for the products is vital to whether the innovation will be effective. In Zhu’s opinion, it’s reasonable that many people in charge of products in IT companies be 20 to 30 years old, because innovation really relies heavily on younger people.

Against the backdrop of economic globalization, multi-lingual semantic recognition and understanding technologies are becoming an inevitable trend. As a widely applied robot, Xiaoi has already gained an advantage in Chinese semantic understanding. Zhu believes that his team will actively develop multi-lingual semantic understanding technologies in the future and lay a foundation for his products to enter global market.

XIE FEIJUN is a reporter with Liberation Daily.