Addressing an audience of global AI visionaries, entrepreneurs, academics, industry giants and government leaders and futurists, China-headquartered Tencent’s Seng Yee Lau, Senior Executive Vice President and Chairman of Group Marketing and Global Brands, delivered a keynote address. The keynote unequivocally called for the creation of a framework and implementation of ‘AI for Good’. Mr Lau was speaking at Ai Everything, hosted at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
Welcomed by His Excellency, Omar bin Sultan Al Olama, UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Mr Lau highlighted that ‘AI for Good’ is an extension of Tencent’s philosophy of ‘Technology for Good’. He reiterated that humans will play a critical role in AI and the principles of humanity will shape new possibilities for social development and elevate the quality of life of people around the world.
Mr Lau said: “We should be aware that when assessing AI’s contribution to realising the goals of sustainable development, the pivotal word is ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – it is not about ‘intelligence’ but about ‘artificial’. Responsible AI is a reflection of human intervention. AI can be a very powerful tool but it must be directed by humans and only then AI can reach its full potential for driving sustainability.”
Through his address, Mr Lau reminded his audience that while AI brings convenience to human beings, people need to co-create values for technology platforms which can then continuously evolve along with machines. The concept of ‘AI for Good’ imagines a future-centric world that will unlock great promise for human society.
In recent years, Tencent launched ‘QQ Alert: Reunion After Years’, a public welfare platform to push missing children’s information to millions of citizens within a city to help locate the child. Using facial recognition software, Tencent has been able to search and compare millions of missing people’s faces at a phenomenal speed of 50 million images per second.
In the healthcare industry, Tencent’s AI solutions are saving lives by helping clinicians improve diagnostic accuracy and efficiency by becoming doctor’s digital assistants. As of July 2018, Tencent MIAIS, Tencent’s first AI medical imaging product, had assisted doctors in reading more than 100 million medical images, serving millions of patients and suggesting 150,000 cases of high-risk lesions. The real-time positioning accuracy of colorectal polyps reached 96.93% and the accuracy of adenocarcinoma diagnosis reached 97.20%.
Tencent has also invested in the field of agriculture and food security. In the Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge hosted by Netherlands’ Wageningen University and Research (WUR) in 2018, Tencent’s iGrow team grew ‘AI cucumbers’ with the second highest total score in terms of output and resource utilisation and the output was more than five times that of human agricultural experts.
Committed to solving real-world problems, Tencent continues to invest in solutions with purpose. Mr Lau advocated for building an open AI ecosystem, bringing together all stakeholders including governments, tech firms, academic institutions and users to ensure technological progress to benefit the human society by establishing positive ecosystem rules and strengthening interaction and cooperation as a whole with shared destiny.
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