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| Kim Ki-nam, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics, delivers a key note speech during the 2019 Samsung AI Forum at Samsung's Seocho office in Seoul, Monday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
By Baek Byung-yeul
Samsung Electronics has vowed to step up its research and development activities in artificial intelligence (AI) technology to maintain a leading position in the fast-changing tech industry, its Vice Chairman Kim Ki-nam said Monday.
The tech company hosted a two-day AI Forum in Seoul, inviting prominent scholars and industry experts from around the world.
During the first day of the event, Kim stressed the emerging technology has already been integrated into many different industrial sectors and emphasized the need for collective intelligence to make further improvements in the technology.
"AI technology has already been influencing various areas of our society. Smart speakers, digital voice assistant services and facial recognition used to unlock a smartphone are representative examples of how AI has changed the world. However, there are challenges and issues to be resolved," Kim said during an opening speech.
"Let's use this forum to suggest the future direction of and strategies for AI technology to benefit the world," the vice chairman added.
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| Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, speaks during the 2019 Samsung AI Forum at Samsung's Seocho office in Seoul, Monday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics |
Samsung has hosted the AI Forum since 2017. The annual forum is to strengthen networks and share knowledge with prominent scholars in the AI sector, in which Samsung has invested significant time and research.
The tech giant has been betting big on AI technology, taking this as one of its new growth engines. In 2018, the company announced it would invest 25 trillion won in new technologies including AI, fifth-generation (5G) networks, future cars and bio-pharmaceuticals.
The company has operated seven AI research centers in five countries including Korea, the United States, Canada, Russia and the U.K.
While the first day's proceedings took place at Samsung's Seocho office in southern Seoul, the second day's event will take place at Seoul R&D Campus.
During the first day, Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and a leading expert on deep learning technology, delivered a keynote speech under the theme of "towards compositional understanding of the world by deep learning."
The professor shared his thoughts on a popular machine learning topic, "meta-learning." Also, known as "learning to learning," meta-learning is a concept of an AI solution that learns by using previous data to quickly adapt to new tasks.
Trevor Darrell, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered a speech on the theme of "adapting and explaining deep learning for autonomous systems," and the New York University professor Cho Kyung-hyun talked about trends in neural machine translation.
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