Camp aims to nurture China's future AI talent

DeeCamp, one of China's largest AI training camps, ended in Beijing on Thursday, as part of broader efforts from Sinovation Ventures, a leading venture capital firm, to nurture more artificial intelligence talent in the country.

Eight groups out of 28 won awards by successfully developing programs ranging from autonomous driving to AI that creates lyrics. These programs were all be incubated by students within five weeks.

"Even though these programs have a distance to go before being commercialized, they were developed within a short time and all focus on forefront areas of AI," said Wang Yonggang, executive director of the AI Institute at Sinovation Ventures.

"We hope to build it into a pilot program to nurture an AI training system for Chinese universities, which will benefit not only this group of 300 students, but also students across the nation," he added.

China surpassed the US in the number of emerging AI projects last year and accounted for over half of the total projects. However, in terms of global AI talent, China made up only 5 percent of the total, according to a Goldman Sachs report.

To fill in this gap, China has called for accelerated efforts to strengthen AI research as well as to train a new generation of talent.

The latest move is also part of a broader plan initiated by the Ministry of Education, Sinovation Ventures and Peking University to nurture more than 5,000 students and 500 teachers in AI from top universities within five years.

Their mentors are senior experts in the field from both home and abroad, such as John Hopcroft, an A.M. Turing Award winner and professor at Cornell University, as well as Li Kaifu, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures.

"In the future, the program is expected to enroll more international teachers and join more universities and companies," said Xu Yongji, deputy head of the international department at the Ministry of Education.

"We hope it can provide Chinese students and teachers with more useful AI training programs to help, in the future, the upgrading of the country's AI industry," he added.