The cultivation of artificial intelligence talents cannot be separated from major universities

The Ministry of Education issued a notice announcing the results of the registration and approval of undergraduate majors in ordinary colleges and universities in 2018. The recently popular artificial intelligence major was included in the list of newly approved undergraduate majors, and a total of 35 universities across the country were qualified for the first batch of construction.

Artificial intelligence has been established as an undergraduate major, and universities are expected to enter the fast lane of artificial intelligence talent training. But after that, what other "shackles" need to be broken? The answer from He Xiaobin, associate professor of the Department of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences of Tsinghua University, is that universities have not yet formed a talent training model for interdisciplinary artificial intelligence, and the cooperation between schools and enterprises is not strong enough.

At the "China AI Innovator Forum" co-organized by Tsinghua University's Institute of Data Science, He Xiaobin talked about the current training of artificial intelligence talents. He said that my country's current artificial intelligence talent training is still far behind that of the United States, and there is a big gap in both the number of university researchers and research results. For example, a comparison of the number of top scholars in 20 universities found that the United States accounted for 68% and China accounted for 24%; and the number of practitioners of intelligent talents in the United States is also twice that of China.

Having studied at Stanford University for many years, He Xiaobin was impressed by the cross-disciplinary integration of Stanford and other universities in the cultivation of artificial intelligence talents. Zhou Feng, CEO of NetEase Youdao, who also has many years of overseas experience, also emphasized the importance of "cross-border" in the cultivation of artificial intelligence talents. "What impressed me deeply was that the cross-border and integration between the various departments of the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University was very strong, and a large number of very good research results were produced." Zhou Feng said.

In recent years, with the popularization of artificial intelligence technology and the urgent demand for talents in the market, universities have been forced to strengthen the training of talents in the field of artificial intelligence. In this regard, He Xiaobin suggested that the research and teaching cooperation between teachers in the humanities and social sciences and AI should be strengthened; school-enterprise cooperation should be strengthened; the joint training of talents in different majors in the school should be strengthened; a big data and artificial intelligence learning and sharing platform should be built, and relevant projects and database construction should be carried out in cooperation.