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On the afternoon of July 16, the 2019 Zhejiang Lab Cup Global AI Competition was officially launched. The competition is co-organized by Zhejiang Lab, China Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA), China Institute of Communications, and the Municipal Government of Hangzhou, under the guidance of the Cyberspace Administration of China and the People’s Government of Zhejiang Province. 

Pan Yunhe, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Zhejiang Lab’s chief scientist in artificial intelligence, delivered a speech at the opening ceremony. He pointed out that today’s AI has entered a new field, as we have extended the boundaries of AI research to natural sciences, engineering technologies, human society, and global trends, knitting them together via information science. “At present, AI is not only a research field for scientists, professors, teachers, and students in computer science, but also a skill that needs to be integrated into every industry and profession. It is therefore necessary to expand the influence of AI through competitions. In addition, since the coming AI 2.0 is a transnational and interdisciplinary exploration project benefitting humanity as a whole, we should attract AI professionals and enthusiasts from all over the world through this competition, in order to collect and promote the most advanced AI algorithms and technologies, as well as put them for further study and improvement,” said Pan.

As scheduled, from July 17 until August 31, competitors can log onto the Zhejiang Lab Platform for AI Competitions (aicup2019.zhejianglab.com) to register.

Based on the theme of “Boundless Knowledge, Infinite AI”, the competition in this year includes two races: the Innovation Race and the Technical Challenge Race. The Innovation Race assigns three tasks in different areas, including Zero-shot Object Detection, Person Re-identification Multiple Object Tracking, and Opinion Mining for E-commerce Reviews. The task for the Technical Challenge Race is Video Captioning.

At the opening ceremony, the competition’s Technical Committee made a detailed introduction to the competition’s rules and tasks. The Innovation Race focuses on AI areas such as image and video processing, natural language processing, and data mining, aiming to boost innovations and breakthroughs in basic AI algorithms. In particular, the task of Zero-shot Object Detection requires competitors to train an object detection model on known categories, so that it can be used to detect examples of unknown categories in different images. The task of Person Re-identification Multiple Object Tracking requires competitors to realize automatic tracking to persons (including pedestrians and persons on non-motor vehicles) appearing in multiple fixed-camera surveillance scenes such as squares, streets, shopping malls, and indoor areas. The task of Opinion Mining for E-commerce Reviews requires competitors to collect and categorize a brand’s attributes and customer opinions from online reviews of its products, so as to define a product’s sentiment polarity and attribute types.

The task of Video Captioning for the Technical Challenge Race requires competitors to use computer vision algorithms to identify and comprehend an input video and eventually generate an accurate text description of its content.

“The tasks of the Innovation Race integrate AI research with practical application in vertical fields, industrial needs, and market promotion, so as to inject new impetus into the development of the real economy through the progress of AI technologies. Meanwhile, the Technical Challenge Race aims to fully leverage the advantages and resources of all competitors to accelerate the development and innovative application of AI,” said Yuan Jixin, Deputy Director of Zhejiang Lab and Secretary-General of the Organizing Committee of the competition.

To motivate young students, researchers, and AI entrepreneurs to engage in the research of AI theories and algorithms, the competition will select one first-prize winner, two second-prize winners, and three third-prize winners for each of the four tasks. The winners will receive cash rewards of 300,000 CNY, 100,000 CNY, and 50,000 CNY, respectively. They will also earn other types of support provided by the organizers’ talent incentives, project resources, and entrepreneurship policies.

It is reported that the 2019 Zhejiang Lab Cup Global AI Competition will focus on basic AI research as well as the combination of industry and finance. With the purpose of attracting talents, facilitating research and boosting industry development through competitions, it aspires to take the lead in tech development. Preliminaries and semi-finals of the competition will run from August to September, and the finals will take place in Hangzhou in October. 

Media Contact
Company Name: Zhejiang Lab
Contact Person: Chen Guang
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Country: China
Website: http://www.zhejianglab.com/