我们总是听说中国主宰了AI，可是为什么大部分领先的AI研究人员和研究中心都位于英美和加拿大呢？ [美国媒体]

Why do we hear so much about China dominating AI, when (as of 2019) most of the leading AI researchers and research centers are US, UK, or Canadian?

我们总是听说中国主宰了AI，可是为什么大部分领先的AI研究人员和研究中心都位于英美和加拿大呢？



Janus Dongye, Coding Peasant at University of Cambridge (2012-present)
Answered Sun • Upvoted by Xiaoyu Liu, MS Computer Science & Bioinformatics, University of Wiscons… and Søren Holstebroe, M.S. Computer Science & Biology, University of Copenhagen (…
As a researcher in the AI field working in the UK, I would like to share some of the honest opinions about this field.
Firstly I would say the entire global AI research community has yet to make significant breakthroughs. Conventional AI based on mathematical reasoning has just failed to achieve higher accuracy than current machine learning based techniques. Despite so many variants in building different learning networks or optimization techniques, we still can’t escape the curse that everything we’ve built is just statistical fitting concluded from a large chunk of training data.

作为在英国工作的AI研发人员，我想分享一些有关这个领域的诚实看法。
首先我得说整个全球的AI研究还没有作出什么重大的突破。传统的数学推理AI在精确度上比不上目前的机器学习技术。虽然在建立不同的学习网络或者最优化技术时存在很多变量，但我们依然逃脱不了的诅咒是我们建造的所有一切都只是从大量训练数据里总结出来的统计拟合。



Yes, all US companies such as Google, Facebook also collect user information as their own private assets. But what’s different for those Chinese companies is that they have to follow Chinese law so that their data can be accessed and coordinated by the Chinese government. This is similar to having a central command that owns and manages all the data across companies. With this efficient control of data, China has much deeper data usage penetration than the US AI companies.

是的，所有美国企业比如谷歌，脸书都搜集用户信息作为自己的私人资产。但是中国企业不同的地方在于他们必须遵守中国法律，即他们的数据必须可以被中国政府获取和协调。这就好比拥有了一个中央指挥部，可以拥有和调动所有这些企业的数据。有了这种对数据的高效控制，中国的数据使用渗透比美国AI企业要深入很多。

So enough about the data, how about technology? Does China really dominate the AI research field?
If you look at all the established publishing venues in machine learning such as CVPR, NIPS, AAAI etc, China is still far behind from the US and Europe in terms of citation counts.
Does it mean China is lagging behind the US?
Of course no. This is far complicated than just thinking in terms of publications.

说够了数据，那么技术呢？中国真的主宰AI研究领域吗？
如果你看那些着名的机器学习出版机构，比如CVPR, NIPS, AAAI，你会发现中国在引用次数上依然落后于欧美。但这意味着中国落后美国吗？当然不是。这比论文发表次数要复杂得多。

Let us instead have a look at the authors from the publications in the US. From this link can you identify how many papers in CVPR are actually written by Chinese Ph.D./researchers in US universities and companies?
https://dblp.org/db/conf/cvpr/cv...
If you don’t have time to look at it, then I will tell you that over half of the papers are written by the Chinese researchers (based on their special PinYin names, such as Zhang, Xiang etc). And I am sure most of them are international students studying in the US but not US citizens.

让我们看看美国出版物的作者都有哪些。从这个链接可以看出CVPR上的多少论文是在美国大学和企业的中国博士/研究人员写的。如果你没时间看，我可以告诉你超过一半的论文都是中国研究人员写的（根据他们的拼音名字可以看出，比如Zhang, Xiang等等）。而且我肯定他们中的大部分都是在美国留学的国际学生，而不是美国公民。



Secondly, talents working in the AI field enjoy a 75% reduction in their personal income tax from some regions in China (This is even a huge plus for the insanely high salary). And there are also various benefits and prizes from the government in housing mortgages and insurances. As far as I know, the US does not have such competitive policies from the government.

第二，AI领域工作的人才在中国某些地区可以享受个人所得税75%的减免。政府还提供各种不同的福利和奖励，比如住房抵押和保险。据我所知，美国政府并没有这种有竞争力的政策。

Thirdly, those talents would be working on the *real* projects instead of toy projects when they were in US and UK research centers. Because those projects are mostly from government contracts, which is facing directly to the 1.4 billion people and enjoying a much more abundance of training data.

第三，这些人才会在真正的项目里工作，而不是他们在欧美研究中心里所从事的那种玩具工程。因为这些项目主要来自政府合同，直接面对14亿人口，能够获得更加充裕的训练数据。

Or if you are working on private projects in startup companies, you will have much more freedom in doing everything, because you don’t need to worry about political correctness, work ethics, or lack of data. You will be gaining special privileges from the Chinese government in doing business with others because you are the “foster target” of the Chinese government. The government caters your AI startups just like their own state enterprises.

或者如果你是在初创公司里从事私人项目，你的自由会更多，因为你没必要担心政治正确，职业道德或者数据缺乏。你可以从中国政府那里获得特权，因为你是中国政府的“培养目标”。政府会想照顾国有企业那样照顾你的AI初创企业。

For example, an AI startup company is given the Chinese government licensed VPN so that all its employees can freely access the resources from Google, Github etc. And the company also enjoys discounts on renting offices and paying taxes etc.
Finally, thanks to those talent programs and policies, China is gradually taking over the lead in AI adoption and applications. It might not be the pioneer in the sharpest machine learning technology in the research domain. But China is the devout believer and leading adopter of the existing AI technology.
Have a visit to China, especially Hangzhou and Shenzhen, and you will know what I meant.

举个例子，一家AI初创企业获得了中国政府授权的VPN，这样该公司所有员工就可以自由的获取谷歌和Github等等的资源。该公司在写字楼租用和税收方面享有折扣。
最后，多亏了这些人才计划和政策，中国在AI采用和应用方面也渐渐领先。中国或许不是最尖端机器学习技术研究领域的先驱者。但是中国是现存AI技术的虔诚信仰者和领先采用者。