Seng Yee Lau, a senior executive at Tencent, has voiced support for AI for Good, the global initiative that seeks to encourage the utilisation of AI technologies for social good through sustainable development.
Lau, the Senior Executive Vice President and Chairman of Group Marketing and Global Brands at the Chinese tech giant, was speaking at Ai Everything conference, taking place at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
“AI for Good” was consistent with Tencent’s philosophy of “Technology for Good,” Lau said. 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.
“We should be aware that when assessing AI’s contribution to realizing 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 keynote, 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 speed of 50 million images per second.
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 & 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.
