The number of people involved in artificial intelligence (AI) in China has increased enormously thanks to the government’s commitment to developing the burgeoning AI industry and considerable value placed onto higher education, but it may take another five years for China’s AI to really come up to the world standards, said John Hopcroft, a Turing Award winner and the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science at Cornell University.
China now leads in AI journal citations after surpassing the US in the total number of journal publications several years ago, according to the 2021 AI Index Report by the Stanford University.
One thing that makes US universities so great is the talent that they get from China, but “the problem between China and the US is there’s a lot of negative and false information about China,” Hopcroft told the Global Times in an exclusive interview at the first Peking University Emerging Engineering International Forum held in Beijing on Saturday.
While the US government whose acrimony with China has increasingly spread to the technology sector, some politicians and scholars in the US have been hyping up “China threat theory.”
For instance, in a report by the Financial Times earlier this month, ex-Pentagon software chief said the failure of the US to respond to Chinese cyber and other threats was putting his children’s future at risk, and the US has “no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years.”
Hopcroft frowned upon “Tech cold war,” another term that are frequently cited by media and politicians frequently.
“Using the word ‘war’ gives the general population the wrong idea. What we should say is China is going to be a strong economic competitor. We’ve got to increase our competition; it’s not a fight,” Hopcroft pointed out.
The first Peking University Emerging Engineering International Forum is held in Beijing on Saturday. Photo: Zhang Dan/GT
Teaching at several prestigious universities in China too, he called on breaking down the barriers of China-US people-to-people exchanges in the educational sector.
“China is going to become the dominant economic power in the world eventually, because you have four times the population of the US. And the US should be figuring out how we should work with China,” Hopcroft suggested.
“We’re no longer going to be the dominant economic power, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be major ones to figure out how to interact. If we separate, then nations are going to fall into two categories,” Hopcroft warned.
Helping to improve China’s undergraduate teaching, the Turing Award recipient will teach top-level freshmen at the Peking University. He said “the class is stronger than the incoming class at Berkeley, Stanford or Cornell.”
Peking University is now ramping up efforts to push forward its construction of Emerging Engineering and Development, a strategic move for the prestigious university to respond to the rising challenges and unprecedented worldwide problems including environmental pollution, cybersecurity and energy crisis.
Chinese government officials, school leadership and the faculty underscored the necessity and urgency to develop emerging engineering disciplines at Saturday’s forum, saying the country still has some bottleneck difficulties.
At present, China, as a developing country, still faces many bottlenecks in engineering and technology sectors, so the demand for core technologies and excellent engineering education are badly needed, Qiu Shuiping, secretary of the Party committee of Peking University, said at the forum.
The construction plan of Emerging Engineering and Development is a response to the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation across the globe, Wu Yan, director of the Higher Education Department at Ministry of Education, said at the forum.
“It should also serve the national economic and social development,” Wu noted.
A total of 13 colleges, research institutions and research centers have been set up as major construction units under the strategy, covering disciplines of core technologies, advanced chips, air pollution control and basic materials.
