US and China ahead of the pack in AI development

The US and China have “stolen a lead” on other nations in the race to harness artificial intelligence (AI), according to a new report by the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

The WIPO study - the first of its kind to track trends in the development and application of AI techniques - found that China accounted for 17 of the top 20 academic institutions for patenting AI, with a focus on developing “deep learning” and neural network methods, which use machine learning to map speech recognition patterns and similar trends.

Announcing the report’s findings, WIPO director-general Francis Gurry said: “The US and China obviously have stolen a lead, they’re out in front in this area, in terms of numbers of applications, and in scientific publications.”

The findings come as trade tensions ratchet up between the two nations and follow a US move to indict Chinese technology firm Huawei over an alleged scheme to pay employees to steal trade secrets. China and Huawei have vigorously denied the allegations.

Addressing the mounting pressure over Huawei, following the arrest of its chief financial officer in Canada last year, Gurry acknowledged that there had been tensions, but said that China had embraced the global intellectual property system and was a “serious player” in the industry, with the largest patent office and domestic patent application regime in the world.

The report’s analysis of commercial patent filings for AI-related technologies found that IBM has the largest portfolio, with 8,920 patents, followed by fellow technology giants Microsoft, Toshiba, Samsung and NEC.

Across the board, machine learning was found to be the dominant field for growth in AI. It was included in more than one-third of all identified inventions (134,777 patent documents) while filings of machine learning-related patents grew annually on average by 28 per cent, with 20,195 patent applications filed in 2016 (compared with 9,567 in 2013).

Patent applications for neural network technology - computing systems which use AI to mirror the data processing of the human brain for solutions such as automated translation - grew by 46.1 per cent on average between 2013 and 2016, while deep learning used in speech recognition systems grew by an average of 174.6 per cent per year over the same period.

Amongst other high growth sectors was the use of AI for robotics, with a 265 per cent increase in patent filings between 2013-2016, while the single most popular application was computer vision, which includes image recognition technology used in self-driving cars, with a total of 21,011 patent filings in 2016.

AI applications for transportation saw a 134 per cent average jump in patent filings, while life and medical sciences registered a 40 per cent rise, followed by personal devices, computing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at 36 per cent growth.

The executive summary of the report said that was increasingly driving important developments in technology and business, from autonomous vehicles to medical diagnosis to advanced manufacturing.

It continued: “As AI moves from the theoretical realm to the global marketplace, its growth is fueled by a profusion of digitised data and rapidly advancing computational processing power, with potentially revolutionary effect: detecting patterns among billions of seemingly unrelated data points, AI can improve weather forecasting, boost crop yields, enhance detection of cancer, predict an epidemic and improve industrial productivity.”

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