In the field of artificial intelligence, the basic abilities of language model, graphic model and even multimodal model of artificial intelligence have been fully demonstrated. For example, Alibaba Dharma Institute announced the latest progress of the multi-modal large model M6, with parameters jumping from trillion to 10 trillion; Pengcheng Lab and Baidu jointly released the world's first 100 billion knowledge enhancement model-Pengcheng-Baidu Wenxin, with a parameter scale of 260 billion.
Not only that, but the cross-integration of artificial intelligence and other scientific fields has also sparked sparks. On the list of scientific breakthroughs in 20021year recently published by Science, AlphaFold and RoseTTA-fold, two technologies based on artificial intelligence to predict the structure of protein, topped the list.
In the field of human-computer interaction, when Zuckerberg renamed Facebook as "Meta", Tesla and SpaceX CEO elon musk focused on the brain-computer interface. Musk believes that brain-computer interface devices will be more likely to change the world and help people with quadriplegia or physical defects to live and work better. "Complex brain-computer interface devices can completely immerse you in virtual reality." In addition, in May this year, Stanford University developed an intracortical brain-computer interface system, which can decode the imaginary handwritten actions of paralyzed patients from the neural activities in the motor cortex and convert them into texts.
In the field of supercomputing, it is most worth mentioning that this year 1 1 month, China's supercomputing application team won the "Gordon Bell Award", the highest award in the field of international high-performance computing applications, with the achievement of "real-time simulation of very large-scale quantum random circuits".
In terms of open source, RISC-V open source instruction set and its ecology have risen rapidly; The open source community of openEuler operating system, led by Huawei, with the participation of Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Kirin Software, has gathered 7,000 active developers, completed more than 8,000 self-maintained open source software packages, and spawned the commercial distribution of 10 manufacturers ...
Looking back on 20021year, the information technology edition invited industry experts to sort out the development context of the above four fields and look forward to the future development trend.
Author Zhang Shuanghu
AlphaFold is the "first brother" in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in 20021year.
Recently, Science magazine published the list of scientific breakthroughs in 20021year, and AlphaFold and RoseTTA-fold, two technologies based on artificial intelligence, ranked first.
A few days ago, AlphaGo and AlphaFold were also on the list of "20021Top Ten Engineering Achievements in the World (Major Achievements in Engineering Science and Technology with Global Influence Verified by Global Practice in Recent Five Years)" selected by the Journal of China Academy of Engineering.
In an interview with China Science, several experts talked about AlphaFold when looking back on the achievements made in the field of artificial intelligence this year.
"AlphaFold for scientific discovery and the artificial intelligence development ecology that China is building cannot be said." Wu Fei, director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of Zhejiang University, told China Science Journal.
Wang Jinqiao, a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, nominated "COVID-19 Diagnosis with AI", "AI for Science" and "Three-modal Model Zidong Taichu".
In the medical field, AI has long been used to detect diseases such as pneumonia, asthma and Alzheimer's disease. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an AI model that can identify COVID-19 patients by analyzing cough recordings. The accuracy rate of identifying COVID-19 patients' cough is 98.5%, and the accuracy rate of identifying asymptomatic infected people is as high as100%. Recently, it was reported that this model has been used to identify Omicron virus.
"Zidong Taichu realized the unified expression of graph-text-sound semantics for the first time, which has the ability of cross-modal understanding and generation." Wang Jinqiao said, "At present, the' All-Media Multimodal Large Model R&D Plan' released with Xinhua News Agency * * * realizes the unified modeling of all-media data understanding and generation, and builds a full-stack domestic media artificial intelligence platform, which has been exploringly applied to the textile industry and automobile industry quality inspection and other scenarios."
1On February 7th, official website, the Ministry of Science and Technology, published three letters to support Harbin, Shenyang and Zhengzhou in building a national experimental zone for the innovation and development of new generation artificial intelligence. So far, China has 18 national experimental zones for the innovation and development of new generation artificial intelligence, which will lead the innovation and development of artificial intelligence in China.
"China is promoting the ecological development of artificial intelligence and building a good ecology." Wu Fei said, "At present, there are 15 national new-generation artificial intelligence development and innovation platforms, 18 national new-generation artificial intelligence innovation and development pilot zones, 8 artificial intelligence innovation and application pilot zones and artificial intelligence undergraduate majors and interdisciplinary training carriers set up by colleges and universities."
"One is the big model, and the other is the combination of artificial intelligence and basic disciplines." Sun Maosong told China Science Journal that "the basic abilities of language model, graphic model and even multimodal model have been fully demonstrated, and its position as the basic soft facility of intelligent information processing has been determined. At the same time, it does not simply expand the scale, but challenges the integration ability and computing ability of digital resources. Although its limitations are obvious, some of its' peculiar' properties (such as small sample learning, double decline in depth, task adjustment based on prompts, etc.) have caused scholars to expect a super-large parameter scale or a qualitative change, thus laying the foundation for new breakthroughs. "
This year, the field of artificial intelligence has moved from "refining model" to "refining model", from the order of 100 billion to the order of one trillion. In the field of large models, it seems that there is no biggest, only bigger.
In March, Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute released China's first ultra-large-scale artificial intelligence model "Enlightenment 1.0". In June, Zhiyuan rewrote its own record and released Enlightenment 2.0, with a parameter scale of 1.75 trillion; In September, Inspur Institute of Artificial Intelligence launched a huge Chinese language model-source 1.0, with 245.7 billion parameters. 1 1 month, Alibaba dharma institute announced the latest progress of the multi-modal large model M6, with the parameters jumping from trillion to 10 trillion; 1February, Pengcheng Lab and Baidu jointly released the world's first 100-billion-dollar model of knowledge enhancement-Pengcheng-Baidu Wenxin, with a parameter scale of 260 billion.
Accordingly, recently, Aauto Quicker and the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich put forward a new recommendation system, Persia, which can support the model training of 100 trillion level parameters.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence is constantly attacking the city in the field of basic disciplines.
In July, the research results of DeepMind's artificial intelligence program Alphafold2 reached the top of Nature. In the field of structural biology research, artificial intelligence may lead biology, medicine and pharmacy into a new world; 1 1 month, researchers at the university of southern California in the United States connected devices through brain computers, allowing monkeys to play games and treadmills, thus conducting research on neural activity data; 1February, the machine learning framework developed by DeepMind has helped people discover two new conjectures in the field of pure mathematics and demonstrated the potential of machine learning to support mathematical research.
"This year, artificial intelligence has also made great achievements in the application of various industries." Sun Maosong said, "The combination of artificial intelligence and basic disciplines has shown great potential, and many top papers have been published, which has shown a strong trend, that is,' artificial intelligence+basic science' is promising."
Author Zhang Shuanghu
Brain-computer interface, AR glasses, intelligent voice, EMG bracelet, gesture recognition from a distance ... 2021year, from basic research to application, the field of human-computer interaction is surging. Whether it is intelligent health, meta-universe, or the vigorous development of autonomous driving, it seems that human-computer interaction is standing at the door of industrialization.
"The Qualcomm ultra-flexible nerve electrode we developed has passed the examination and approval of scientific research and clinical ethics, and the human clinical trial of brain-computer interface will be carried out soon." Tao Hu, deputy director of the Shanghai Institute of Microsystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences and deputy director of the Joint State Key Laboratory of Sensing Technology, told the China Science Journal that "safely and stably collecting large-scale neuron signals of the human brain and conducting closed-loop regulation will realize the restoration of patients' perception and motor function."
Brain-computer interface technology brings more and more convenience to patients. In May this year, researchers at Stanford University published a cover paper in Nature, and developed a set of intracortical brain-computer interface system, which can decode the imaginary handwritten movements of paralyzed patients from the neural activities in the motor cortex and convert them into texts. With the help of this system, subjects (paralyzed by spinal cord loss) can type nearly 100 characters per minute, and the off-line accuracy rate after automatic correction exceeds 99%.
Not long ago, Musk said that he hopes to use Neuralink's microchip device on humans next year. The chip will be used to treat brain diseases and nervous system diseases such as spinal cord injury and Parkinson's disease. At present, the relevant technology is waiting for the approval of the US Food and Drug Administration.
"considerable technology has been accumulated in the field of brain-computer interface, which is expected to become a weapon to solve brain diseases." Tao Hu said, "Everyone is seizing the opportunity of clinical application, and technology may be applied next year. It is expected that within two or three years, there will be unicorn enterprises comparable to Musk Neuralink in China. "
"Human-computer interaction will lead to a new trillion-dollar market." This judgment by distinguished professor Yan Qun of Fuzhou University also includes the huge market of the meta-universe.
Some people call 202 1 year "the first year of the meta-universe", while others think that this is just "new wine in old bottles". But in any case, the metauniverse has become an unavoidable topic in the field of human-computer interaction this year.
"Metauniverse is a synthesis of virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality, which is actually nothing new." Liu Wei, director of the Laboratory of Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive Engineering of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told China Science Journal that "Metauniverse is the future development direction of the real world and the virtual world, but there are still some technical problems that have not been solved well."
In the real world, the problem of man-machine interaction and the mixed problem of man-machine environment system have not been solved well. In human-computer interaction in the real world, objective data, subjective information and knowledge are still not perfectly integrated, whether in the process of input, processing or output.
Liu Wei believes that whether in the real world or the virtual world, human and machine decision-making have "fast decision-making" and "slow decision-making" processes. Human decision-making sometimes relies more on logical decision-making and sometimes more on intuitive decision-making. This kind of "mixed decision-making" is constantly changing, and it is difficult to find the changing law. The problem of machine decision-making in this respect has not been solved yet.
"The Metauniverse is still in the early stage of painting cakes." Liu Wei said, "Because its underlying mechanism has not been solved-people can't solve the problem of human-computer interaction perfectly in the real world, and it can't be solved in the meta-universe."
When it comes to human-computer interaction, Liu Wei thinks that the second problem that cannot be ignored is "complex field".
"This year's Nobel Prize in Physics has also given the proponent of a complex system model for predicting climate change." Liu Wei said, "Human-computer interaction is also a complex system, which includes both repetitive problems and messy and cross-domain collaborative problems."
Liu Wei believes that from the perspective of intelligence, complex systems include three important components, one is people, the other is equipment (man-made things) and the third is environment. This is actually a "man-machine ring system" problem in which many things interact, interweave and overlap.
"In human-computer interaction, the machine is strong in dealing with the problem of' complexity', and people are good at managing' miscellaneous' things-cross-domain collaboration, balance between things, etc. Because people haven't found the simple operation law of complex things, so to solve all the problems of intelligent products and intelligent systems, we should find their combination, integration and interaction points from the system of man, machine and environment. Moreover, people must be in a dominant position in this system. "
The third phenomenon that attracted Liu Wei's attention in the field of human-computer interaction was that "artificial intelligence helped mathematicians discover some laws". "Recently, DeepMind has developed a machine learning framework that can help mathematicians discover new conjectures and theorems." Liu Wei said, "Artificial intelligence is a basic mathematical tool, and at the same time, mathematics reflects some basic laws. If artificial intelligence can help mathematicians deal with some mathematical problems, then people will better understand the simple laws of complex systems and may make new breakthroughs in human-computer interaction. "
Author Zhang Yunquan (researcher, Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
This year is a bumper year for supercomputing applications in China.
1 1 At the Global Supercomputing Conference (SC2 1) held in the United States in mid-October, China Supercomputing Application Team won the "Gordon Bell Award", the highest academic award in the field of high-performance computing applications, for its pioneering simulation of quantum circuits based on a new Shenwei system.
At the same time, in the final of SC 2 1 College Students Supercomputing Competition, Tsinghua University Supercomputing Team won the championship again, achieving four consecutive championships in SC competition. The achievements in scalability and performance tuning of these large-scale application software show that the development of parallel software in China is in the ascendant.
Looking back at the industry driven by supercomputing, we should revisit the term "computational economy". As early as 20 18, we put forward the concept of "computational economy", and thought that the computational economy with supercomputing as the core would become a representative index to measure the development degree of a local digital economy and the main means to convert old and new kinetic energy.
Based on the development trend in recent years, we believe that the current development trend of high-performance computing has fully demonstrated that with the integration and innovation of supercomputing, cloud computing, big data and AI, computing power has become the key to the development of the entire digital information society, and computing power economy has entered the historical stage.
Through the comprehensive analysis of the development status of high-performance computers in China in 20021year, we can conclude that the current high-performance computing is showing the following characteristics.
First of all, high performance computing and cloud computing have been deeply integrated. High-performance computing is usually based on MPI, efficient communication, heterogeneous computing and other technologies, and tends to run exclusively. Cloud computing has the ability of flexible deployment and fault tolerance, and supports virtualization, unified resource scheduling and flexible system configuration.
With the development of technology, supercomputing and container cloud are merging and innovating, and high-performance cloud has become a new product service. AWS, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Baidu and the representative of commercial supercomputing "North Long Chaoyun" have all launched high-performance cloud services and products based on supercomputing and cloud computing technology.
Secondly, the application of supercomputing has developed from high precision in the past to a wider and wider direction. With the development of supercomputers, especially the declining cost of use, its application fields have also rapidly expanded from precision research, information security, oil exploration, aerospace and "high cold" scientific computing fields with national strategic significance to a wider main battlefield of the national economy, such as pharmaceuticals, gene sequencing, animation rendering, digital movies, data mining, financial analysis and Internet services, which can be said to have penetrated into all walks of life of the national economy.
Judging from the list of China Top 100 High Performance Computing in recent years (HPC TOP 100), supercomputing systems used to focus on scientific computing, government, energy, electricity, meteorology and other fields, while supercomputing systems deployed by Internet companies accounted for a considerable proportion in recent five years, and their main applications were cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, big data analysis and short video. The sharp increase in demand for computing in these fields shows that supercomputing is merging with Internet technology.
From the Linpack performance share of HPC TOP 100 list, the computing service ranks first with 46%; Supercomputing centers accounted for 24%, ranking second; Artificial intelligence, cloud computing and short video followed closely with 9%, 5% and 4% respectively.
It can be seen that the continuous increase in the proportion of artificial intelligence is closely related to the rapid rise of algorithms and applications such as machine learning and the wide application of deep learning algorithms in big data. Internet companies rediscovered the value of supercomputers, especially heterogeneous supercomputers accelerated by GPU, through deep learning algorithms, and invested heavily in building new systems.
On the whole, the current computing services, supercomputing centers, artificial intelligence, scientific computing and other fields are the main users of high-performance computing, and the Internet, big data, especially AI fields are growing strongly.
Thirdly, a strategic computing power layout plan has been formulated at the national level. In May this year, the National Development and Reform Commission and other four departments jointly issued the "Implementation Plan for Computing Hub of Collaborative Innovation System of National Integrated Big Data Center", proposing to build national computing hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Gansu and Ningxia, and start the implementation of the "east-to-west computing" project, urging the data in the east to be sent to the west for storage and calculation, and establishing computing nodes in the west to improve the unbalanced layout of digital infrastructure.
Finally, the computing power demand of artificial intelligence has become the main driving force for the development of computing power. Algorithm innovations such as machine learning and deep learning, big data collected through Internet of Things, sensors, smart phones, smart devices and Internet technologies, and super computing power composed of supercomputers and cloud computing are recognized as the "Troika" in the era of artificial intelligence, and * * * set off the latest round of artificial intelligence revolution.
Under the background of the vigorous development of artificial intelligence, virtualized cloud computing has evolved into high-performance container cloud computing, and the integration and innovation of big data, parallel computing and machine learning has become the latest direction of industrial development.
In addition, in terms of intelligent computing evaluation, China has put forward many benchmark testing programs including AIPerf 500, which is a powerful supplement to the traditional Linpack testing standards.
These developments show that the penetration of supercomputing technology into the industry is accelerating, and we have entered an era of artificial intelligence relying on computing power, which is also one of the inevitable trends in the future development. With the increasing demand of users for computing power, computing power economy will surely occupy an important position in the future social development.
Author Wu Yanjun (researcher, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
The development of open source is remarkable, not just this year. In recent years, many important things have happened in the field of open source.
For example, RISC-V open source instruction set and the rapid rise of its ecology. This is the same as the birth of Linux in the early 1990s. At that time, UNIX and Windows were the mainstream, and few people could have predicted that today's operating system with Linux as the kernel has spread all over people's lives.
Nowadays, more than 80% of the apps people use every day are running on the Android operating system with Linux as the kernel, and the operating system running on the back-end server supporting their business is also a Linux distribution.
Therefore, today's RISC-V may also be underestimated, thinking that it is immature and difficult to compete with ARM and X86. But perhaps in the future, RISC-V, like Linux, will eventually become the mainstream instruction set ecology in the world, with products covering all aspects.
In 2020 alone, the membership of RISC-V International(RVI, the new name after the RISC-V Foundation moved to Switzerland) increased by 133%. In fact, the fact that RVI moved to Switzerland itself is also of great significance. It is a classic case in which the open source field keeps its initial intention of not "choosing a side station" in the face of competition from big countries, which is worthy of reference from other open source foundations around the world.
In China, at the end of 20 19, an open source community of openEuler operating system led by Huawei and participated by Institute of Software of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Kirin Software was formally established. In just two years, the community has gathered 7,000 active developers, completed more than 8,000 self-maintained open source software packages, and spawned the commercial distribution of more than 10 vendors.
This is the first real "root community" in the field of basic software in China. Although there is still a gap with Debian and Fedora, which have a history of more than 20 years, it has taken an important step. For academic research, technology research and development, and industrial innovation, it finally has a new platform that is dominated by China and can be accumulated for a long time.
At the same time, Huawei launched the HarmonyOS operating system Harmony OS after the overseas supply of the Android operating system GMS (Google Mobile Service) was cut off, and started the open source project OpenHarmony under the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation.
At present, OpenHarmony has attracted many domestic manufacturers to participate in a short time, which also reflects the strong demand of the domestic industry for a new generation of Internet of Everything operating system. Although there is still a gap between it and Android in terms of ecological scale and technical integrity, it has taken the first step to build its own ecology.
This is equivalent to drawing a boundary for the fair use of source code, that is, fair use is limited to the interface, and once it goes deep into the implementation code of the interface, it needs to comply with the relevant license. This is of great reference significance to the legal definition of open source intellectual property rights.
In May this year, "202 1 China Blue Book of Open Source Development" was released. It not only systematically sorts out the current situation of open source talents, projects, communities, organizations, education and businesses in China, and gives development suggestions, but also provides reference for the relevant administrative departments of the national government to formulate open source policies and lay out open source strategies, and provides more case references and data support for scientific research institutes, technology enterprises and open source practitioners.
Whether the open source software is developing towards the open source software and hardware ecology around the open instruction set, or the open source has strict legal boundary constraints, or the domestic leading enterprises are trying to solve the "stuck neck" problem through open source exploration, and have achieved certain results ... Many cases point to one direction-the open source trend is unstoppable. Because it stems from the nature of human beings to share knowledge and create collaboratively, it is also an important mode for human civilization to pass on from generation to generation in the digital age.
Of course, it is undeniable that there are still many problems in open source, for example, the security of open source software supply chain. The security here not only has the problems of software quality and security loopholes in the traditional sense, but also has the problem that open source software can not be maintained continuously and effectively (for example, OpenSSL has only two part-time maintainers when HeartBleed problems occur, and log4j has only three part-time maintainers when problems occur), and there is also the problem of "supply failure" caused by competition among big countries (for example, GitHub once restricted the access of Iranian developers).
With the concentration of open source software to commercial platforms such as GitHub, this problem will become more prominent and even become a major risk. Open source software, an intellectual asset that should belong to all mankind, may become a weapon to implement "long arm jurisdiction" In order to avoid this problem, public infrastructures such as open source code hosting platform and open source software construction and publishing platform need to be "decentralized". The world needs multiple open source software infrastructures to eliminate the threat of political forces to the open source community to the greatest extent.
For China, as open source software has become an important supporting part of many major infrastructures such as scientific research and industry, open source software itself should also have an infrastructure with the functions of code hosting, compilation, construction, testing, release, operation and maintenance, so as to ensure the security and continuity of open source software supply and further enhance the confidence of all walks of life in using open source software.
In the future, core technology innovation and open source contribution will become a new driving force for the development of domestic enterprises, or push China's open source cause to another climax.