While there is a plethora of innovative artificial intelligence based companies, none come close to Baidu

Baidu Inc., is one of the largest providers of Chinese language Internet services. Today, it is also one of the leading artificial intelligence innovators in the world. The company has helped China position itself on the global tech map while also boosting its economy along with Alibaba and Tencent.

Sources reveal that in 2020 alone, Baidu’s core R&D expenditure accounted for 21.4% of its revenue, becoming one of the top Internet companies with the highest R&D spending. Further, Baidu also claims to have most artificial intelligence-related patent applications in China. This is a testament to Baidu’s long-term commitment to driving technological advancement. Today, Baidu is actively and often successfully integrating artificial intelligence technologies into all of its major businesses. This ranges from search engine, to drug discovery and even autonomous driving. In 2018, Baidu became the first Chinese company to join an artificial intelligence ethics group (Partnership on AI (PAI)) led by top U.S. tech firms, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Apple Inc and Facebook Inc.

Here are some notable innovations in artificial intelligence applications from Baidu:

The COVID-19 Conundrum

During the COVID-19 outbreak too, the company had leveraged its expertise in artificial intelligence, and associated technologies and products, to support frontline efforts to prevent and control the pandemic. It created an artificial intelligence system that uses infrared technology to predict passengers’ temperatures at Beijing’s Qinghe Railway Station. Its Smart Consulting Assistant has also proved resourceful in helping doctors make rapid diagnoses and initiate treatment online.

Last year, Baidu had also open-sourced its Ribonucleic acid (RNA) prediction algorithm LinearFold. This artificial intelligence algorithm aims to accelerate the prediction time of a virus’s RNA secondary structure, which is crucial to understand it and developing vaccines. Researchers found that LinearFold is capable of predicting the secondary structure of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA sequence in only 27 seconds, 120 times faster than other methods. Apart from LinearFold, Baidu has also launched PaddleHelix, a machine learning-based bio-computing framework aimed at facilitating the development of vaccine design, drug discovery, and precision medicine.

Baidu’s Autonomous Vehicles Ventures

 Apollo is an ambitious, open-source platform from Baidu that is designed to support self-driving vehicles. Apollo’s deep-learning inference support is designed to handle complex driving environments, including sensor fusion and AI processing. Baidu’s Automated Valet Parking (AVP) which runs on ACU-Advanced and Xilinx’s hardware is also built on Apollo. Last year, Baidu made headlines for its demonstration of Fully Automated Driving without a safety driver via live streaming. Using Apollo’s new Fully Automated Driving capability, the artificial intelligence system can independently drive without a safety driver inside the vehicle, a breakthrough that will accelerate the large-scale deployment of autonomous driving technology across China.

PaddlePaddle

Baidu’s PaddlePaddle offers software developers of all skill levels the tools, services, and resources they need to rapidly adopt and implement deep learning at scale. It also hosts toolkits for cutting-edge research purposes, like Paddle Quantum for quantum-computing models and Paddle Graph Learning for graph-learning models. Companies like LinkingMed have used PaddlePaddle to develop an AI-powered pneumonia screening and the lesion-detection system being used in the hospital affiliated with Xiangnan University in Hunan Province. By using Paddle Detection, a PaddlePaddle toolkit for image processing, Jinlu Technology trains an instance-segmentation model for sorting waste plastic bottles.

Natural Language Comprehension

One of the most sought after yet trickiest challenges of artificial intelligence algorithms is to enhance its NLP abilities. Baidu’s ERNIE (short for Enhanced Representation through kNowledge Integration), is presently the best in the world by GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) score. ERNIE can understand blocks of language in context and therefore comprehend commands and interactions of all kinds efficiently. Some of the ERNIE’s iterations like ERNIE-GEN enable language generation tasks, like dialogue engagement, question generation, and abstractive summarization. In contrast, ERNIE-ViL helps with visual understanding.

Other Exemplary Inventions

In 2015, Baidu launched its intelligent personal assistant, Duer. Also dubbed as the Chinese Apple Siri, Duer includes multi-modal interaction, natural language processing, and other such technologies for a natural interaction and smarter understanding.

Baidu’s Deep Speech is a state-of-the-art speech recognition system developed using end-to-end deep learning by Baidu Research. It has also developed a production-quality text-to-speech (TTS) system using deep neural network – Deep Voice. Baidu mentions that its Deep Voice is faster and more efficient than Google’s WaveNet. Baidu also has SwiftScribe,  an AI-Powered Transcription Software among its wide array of artificial intelligence innovations. Based on Deep Speech 2, the main function of SwiftScribe is to transcribe audio material into the text in order to solve the problem of consuming a large amount of time-by-word dictation.

Baidu Brain, is another core artificial intelligence innovation from the Beijing based company that features advanced technology for recognizing and processing speech, images and words as well as building user profiles based on big data analysis.

Moreover, last year, Baidu launched its own artificial intelligence-based accelerator called Kunlun K200 SoC. This 256-TOPS accelerator was designed to handle its internal deep-learning workloads. The K200 accelerates common neural-network and SQL operations. On artificial intelligence inference benchmarks, it matches the power efficiency of Nvidia’s T4 card. This year, Baidu will start mass production of Kunlun 2.

The post BAIDU : TOP ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE INNOVATIONS FROM THE CHINESE ‘GOOGLE’ appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.

Baidu, Inc. recently announced that it will increase its investments in cloud computing, AI education, AI platforms, chipsets, and data centers in the coming ten years as part of its efforts to construct “new infrastructure” for the smart economy of the future.

Under the plan, Baidu aims to have 5 million intelligent cloud servers by 2030 and train 5 million AI professionals within 5 years, which will help facilitate the widespread application of AI in transportation, city management, finance, energy, health care, and manufacturing to eventually achieve industrial intelligence.

“New infrastructure–which encompasses emerging technologies like AI, cloud computing, 5G, IoT, and blockchain–will be the driver for China’s economic development in the coming decades,” said Baidu Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang, underscoring the importance of the plan.

As a world-leading AI platform company, Baidu is well positioned to make large contributions to the development of new infrastructure in China, which will support the implementation of AI applications in different industries.”

The investment plan will see Baidu deploy 5 million intelligent cloud servers by 2030, an ambitious target that would create a combined computing capability equal to seven times the total calculable computing power of the world’s existing top 500 supercomputers.

Viewing human capital as a core component of new infrastructure, Baidu also intends to train 5 million AI professionals in the next five years. Baidu has been working with more than 200 leading universities in China to develop courses related to AI and deep learning and has already trained more than 1 million AI experts.

As a developer of both AI infrastructure and AI applications, Baidu is well-positioned to contribute to building new style infrastructure, which is at the core of China’s “New Infrastructure” policy to accelerate economic growth and industrial upgrade.

Baidu has more than 7,000 published AI patent applications in China, the highest in the country. The AI open platform Baidu Brain has made available more than 250 core AI capabilities to over 1.9 million developers, while PaddlePaddle, the largest open-source deep learning platform in China, services 84,000 enterprises. Baidu’s Kunlun and Honghu AI chips are among the highest preforming AI chips and are built for a wide range of scenarios. Baidu Cloud is China’s leader in public cloud and AI cloud services with more than ten data centers across the country.

This new infrastructure is already allowing Baidu to lead the intelligent transformation of different industries. Baidu’s smart finance products serve nearly 200 financial institutions, while Baidu’s intelligent healthcare prouducts are deployed at more than 300 hospitals and 1500 grassroots medical institutions. Baidu Brain for Cities is already in place in Chongqing, Suzhou, and other cities, supporting more intelligent city management. Baidu’s new investments will enhance its ability to rollout AI applications in these scenarios, as well as in manufacturing, energy, and transportation.

The post Baidu Unveils Plan To Increase Investments In New Infrastructure appeared first on Artificial Intelligence.