Chinese university unveils open platform for AI knowledge computing

Tsinghua University on Monday unveiled THUKC, an open and free platform for knowledge computing, with aims to push forward China’s basic theoretical research on Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Tsinghua University debuted the platform as it announced the establishment of the Knowledge Intelligence Research Center under its Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The platform includes knowledge graphs like language knowledge graph HowNet in Chinese and English, web-based encyclopedia knowledge graph XLORE, based on Wikipedia and its Chinese counterpart Baidu Baike, and science and technology information service platform Aminer, covering more than 200 million research papers.

A knowledge graph is a knowledge toolkit integrated with a graph database which can support a much wider and deeper range of services than a plain graph database.

Zhang Bo, director of the Tsinghua Institute for Artificial Intelligence and academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said AI in the future should be trustworthy and reliable. The current deep learning has some limits due to its reliance on data, and it needs large and high-quality knowledge support.

You Zheng, vice president of Tsinghua University and academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that the university hopes to pool outstanding researchers and talent in knowledge intelligence research and make breakthroughs in basic theoretical AI research, contributing to China’s AI development strategy.