The advent of AI starts a new chapter of human civilization. Gradually AI has become a new arena where businesses compete for dominance. Characterized by sophistication, convenience, intelligence, efficiency, and technology, the modern and promising AI industry is changing people’s lives.
After a remarkable 4-1 victory in 2016 when AlphaGo, a computer Go program, defeated the 9-dan professional and world champion Lee Sedol, AI startups have sprung up around the world. Backed by its team of top scientists and strong technological strength, SenseTime has survived the cut-throat competition in the AI industry and turned into a leading intelligent software vendor in Asia within less than a decade.
One of the core technologies of AI, machine vision provides tremendous technological support for the implementation of China’s smart manufacturing strategy. SenseTime’s founding team has specialized in computer vision for over 20 years. Their continuing input in this field has translated into an extensive portfolio of original technologies and enabled the company to grab the opportunities for fundraising amid the wave of AI commercialization in China. On December 30, 2021, SenseTime was successfully listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange and became the first AI company to go public in China. This demonstrates investors’ confidence in and expectations of the value of hard & core technology.
According to SenseTime’s 2021 annual report, its four business domains, namely Smart Business, Smart City, Smart Life, and Smart Auto, all achieved revenue growth over the past year. Autonomous driving technology has been a long-term focus of SenseTime’s research effort to reach the technology frontier in the driverless era. In 2021, SenseTime launched SenseAuto—an intelligent automotive application platform—to commercialize its full line of products, including smart pilot system, smart cabin system, vehicle-to-everything (V2X) system, L4 autonomous driving system, and autonomous minibus system. SenseTime will leverage the SenseAuto platform to harness the power of AI to meet the demands of people and industries by providing convenient solutions for urban traffic management, logistics and transport, and traveling.
近期,《知產人物 IP PEOPLE》英文國際期刊就人工智能這個熱門話題與商湯科技聯合創始人、首席科學家、絕影智能汽車事業群總裁王曉剛進行了深入交流,探討了商湯的科研新成果與未來發展方向,近距離感受到了國內人工智能的成長。
Recently, IP PEOPLE had an in-depth conversation on AI with Wang Xiaogang, Co-founder and Chief Scientist at SenseTime, and President of SenseAuto Business Unit. During the interview, Dr. Wang shared the latest R&D outcomes and future direction of SenseTime, and the AI development in China.
IP PEOPLE: SenseTime has become an industry-leading AI software provider, and the four core business domains—Smart Business, Smart City, Smart Life, and Smart Auto—are all among the best in the industry. What is the main reason behind SenseTime’s rapid and high-quality development?
Wang Xiaogang: Thanks to China’s big efforts to stimulate technological innovation and develop digital infrastructure, AI technology is integrating with the real economy at an increasingly fast pace. This has provided AI companies, including us, with enormous opportunities and scenarios for technology application. We formed teams essential to our business when we founded SenseTime and have gradually improved the talent cultivation system. Our founding team has been focusing on computer vision for more than 20 years so far. In the past four years, we invested RMB 8 billion in R&D. The ongoing input allows us to accumulate original technological capabilities, and better forecast and grab the market opportunity.
Wang Xiaogang: We decided to pursue innovation to push the boundaries of the industry in the early days of our company. AI has scaled up efficiency in many industries and is evolving at a very fast speed. We would gain a competitive edge over others if we innovate faster than they copy us, and innovation is achieved with talent, tools, and coverage of user scenarios. If we can accomplish that, we would be able to utilize the time that our rivals need to catch up with us to plan for our business. Innovation brings incremental value. Our achievement has validated our choice of technology innovation.
Wang Xiaogang: As an AI company, we protect our innovations through different intellectual property (IP) rights, such as patent, software copyright, trademark, trade name, and know-how. We believe in the power of IPR to maintain market order and crack down on malicious infringement. With increasing investment in R&D and IP year by year, the number of our annual patent applications and that of patent licenses we grant have increased by more than 100% for five consecutive years, which offered effective protection of our innovations in overseas markets.
To create an atmosphere that encourages and protects innovation, we give rewards worth over RMB 10 million each year to inventors or designers of innovations. In addition, we have established a reporting system to collect infringement evidence and ensure the effectiveness of our IP protection.
IP PEOPLE: As of the end of 2021, SenseTime had 11,494 global patents, a 96% increase compared to 2020. What triggered such a significant increase in patents?
Wang Xiaogang: It is a result of SenseTime’s tremendous effort in technological R&D and IP protection. In 2021, we ramped up investments in R&D and expanded our R&D team, yielding more innovations and intellectual properties. With further improvement of the IP protection system and innovation incentive mechanism, our IP team dug deeper into our innovations and made effective plans for their development. As a result, the innovation efficiency has significantly improved. In 2021, we made great breakthroughs in overseas market expansion and substantially increased investment in patent portfolio planning overseas, which also contributed to the surge in the number of patents.
The number looks good, but it is never our goal. In fact, we attach more importance to the quality and effective protection of IP than quantity. We are committed to building a high-quality patent portfolio by rigorously evaluating and screening the innovations to make them more patentable and make it easier to detect infringements, and by strengthening the organization and value assessment of granted patents.
《IP PEOPLE》:發明專利占比高達78%,這在商湯的商業發展中有起到怎樣的作用嗎?
IP PEOPLE: With 78% of the patents being inventions, what role has this played in SenseTime’s business development?
Wang Xiaogang: Primarily, a high proportion of SenseTime’s products and services are software and algorithms, which render them to be patented as inventions. A few years ago, the percentage of invention patents was even higher, hitting nearly 90%.
However, this is not what we are after. We aim at using IP as an effective business weapon through reasonable planning for the company’s patent portfolio. Continuing to expand our product range and explore IP protection practices, we will make strategic planning for the utility model and design patent portfolios when necessary, in order to ensure adequate protection of various types of products. It is easy to identify infringing utility model and design patents, and we will make full use of this to defend our IP. This demonstrates the maturity of our product series and IP protection policy.
IP PEOPLE: You have been leading SenseTime’s AI development. What challenges have you encountered during the transformation of innovations into practical applications? Could you share your experience?
Wang Xiaogang: The development of AI, from original research to product creation, depends heavily on industry-university-research cooperation. Highly aware of the fact that “the sustainable development of AI would be impossible without the continuous research on cutting-edge technology”, SenseTime has formed partnerships with more than 50 universities and established 15 joint laboratories for industry-university-research collaboration. By associating the research topics in laboratories with practical problems in industrial applications, we have built a bridge between technological innovation and industrial application, and enabled talent training that combines academic research and applied research.
Based on our original technologies and insight into the market, we have created a unique model, namely “1 (basic research) + 1 (products and solutions) + X (industry)”. Specifically, we keep bringing research breakthroughs to industries in need, and industries’ growing demands for more advanced technology will prompt researchers to keep expanding the frontier of knowledge. As a result, a virtuous circle is formed to inject vitality into the intelligent transformation of industries.
IP PEOPLE: In 2021, SenseTime was ranked among the top 10 global intelligent driving patent holders and launched SenseAuto, an intelligent automotive application platform. What is the main competitive advantage of SenseTime?
Wang Xiaogang: The smart auto industry is undergoing a transformation from “manufacturing” to the “manufacturing + service” model. To make automobiles more intelligent, all parties in the industry chain need to work closely to figure out how to use technologies to enable intelligent application scenarios for automobiles in a cost-effective manner. Backed by its research experience and industry-leading full-stack AI capabilities, SenseAuto leverages the SenseCore AI infrastructure to integrate algorithms, computing power, and platforms, drastically reducing the cost of factors of production in AI and enabling efficient, low-cost AI innovation and implementation at scale.
SenseAuto now leads the industry in AI productivity, with a full range of products developed, namely SenseAuto Pilot, SenseAuto Cabin, SenseAuto RoboX, SenseAuto Connect and SenseAuto Empower. A sound testing and data accumulation system has taken shape. Furthermore, SenseAuto can be integrated with other business domains of SenseTime. For example, SenseAuto debuted the world’s first AR-powered self-driving minibus at the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
Through cooperation with many leading auto companies at home and abroad, SenseTime has gradually mastered the entire technical process of auto makers and quality standard system, laying a solid foundation for further technology implementation. By 2021, we signed contracts with more than 30 automobile companies, and we have been selected as the supplier to pre-install our SenseAuto products for more than 23 million automobiles.
In the smart auto industry, a robust quality system can ensure safe driving and enable seamless interactions. SenseAuto has maintained strict quality management since it ventured into the smart auto industry in 2016. SenseTime got the ISO 9001 certification in 2016, and was certified with ASPICE CL1 and CL2 in 2019 and 2020 respectively, making it the first AI company in Asia to obtain the ASPICE certification.
In the first quarter of 2022, we upgraded our organizational structure and established the SenseAuto Business Unit. We will step up our efforts to develop the smart auto business and stay committed to developing SenseAuto into the most influential AI-powered platform and leading the intelligent transformation of the automobile industry.
IP PEOPLE: Talent has always been an important resource that AI companies around the world scramble for. We have learned that SenseTime’s R&D team accounts for 70% of the total number of employees, which is a rather high percentage among tech companies. So, how does SenseTime develop R&D teams to stimulate innovation?
Wang Xiaogang: Talent development has been a top priority of SenseTime since day one. We invest a lot of resources to build a training system that fits the career development paths and the life cycle of employees. To support employees’ career advancement, our career development center provides professional training programs for employees at different stages and in different positions. For talent hired through campus recruitment, we offer various training programs such as AI Pilot and AI Pioneer, and integrate general training with on-the-job training to help employees improve their job competency. For new hires recruited through other means, we provide various online learning programs and offline centralized training.
We organize a team of top experts to develop mini-courses in various disciplines, which, along with the general training and soft skills courses taught by experts, can comprehensively enhance the capabilities of employees. Besides, we have designed a leadership development system for managers at different levels based on SenseTime’s leadership models and abundant internal and external resources. We have also developed an online learning platform. By continuously empowering employees, we strive to build a learning organization in the new era and promote the development of employees and the company.
IP PEOPLE: AI is currently one of the top buzzwords in the tech world. Many global tech giants have made tremendous investments in the R&D of AI. How would you characterize China’s AI development when it is benchmarked against the highest level in the world?
Wang Xiaogang: Although a latecomer in AI development, China has introduced a series of policies to support the development of AI. The AI industry in China is characterized by rapid growth in basic technology research and fast expansion of the group of AI researchers. Take SenseTime for example. In terms of quantitative output, we had 11,494 global patents as of the end of 2021, a 96% increase compared to 2020, of which 78% were invention patents. SenseTime has published more than 600 top papers on deep learning for computer vision (the “by-products of innovation”), ranking first among companies around the world.
In terms of AI technology implementation, the huge domestic market provides favorable conditions for “AI+”—the integration of AI and industries—and generates considerable needs for AI applications. Nonetheless, we should realize that we still fall short of systematization, basic theory, and original innovation, and that we still fall behind our peers overseas in the hardware ecosystem and AI technology toolchain.
《IP PEOPLE》:我們未來還需要繼續做出哪些努力?
IP PEOPLE: What efforts should we continue to make in the future?
Wang Xiaogang: We should uphold long-term thinking, take seriously the development of key talent, and underline the originality of research. Bringing together top talent and maintaining a talent pool is essential to the development of China’s AI innovation. We should also explore application scenarios and use existing applications to drive the development of original technology. The Chinese market can quickly adopt new technologies and applications, and spawn new demands for scenarios within a short time. As we facilitate the application of a technology, we would generate more demands for further advances in the technology.
IP PEOPLE: Years ago, you said that AI would bring new opportunities to humanity. And as the industry evolves, how will AI technology impact humanity in the future?
Wang Xiaogang: Through the joint efforts of academia, enterprises, government, and other relevant parties in the past few years, AI is rapidly penetrating into manufacturing and people’s everyday life, driving numerous intelligent transformations. Based on AI infrastructure and breakthroughs in big data technology, AI has accelerated our pursuit of truth. It is the AI-enabled change in the innovation paradigm that has freed humans from their dependence on self-awareness for the first time.
We should also notice that technological innovation often comes from the demolition of existing knowledge. It is, therefore, necessary to set rules for technological development, establish an ethical framework for technology, and guide the direction of development to stimulate technological innovations that bring positive changes.
If we want AI to bring universal benefits, inclusiveness, and fairness, we must substantially reduce the cost of the factors of production, so that resources such as education and healthcare that were previously not accessible can be made available to the whole society in a better, more affordable, and fairer manner. At the same time, we must care for the disadvantaged. Only in this way can we use technology to better benefit all human beings and leverage AI for the greater social good.
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