Booth of Tencent Cloud at the China International Big Data Industry Expo 2021 in Guiyang, Southwest China's Guizhou Province on May 27, 2021 Photo: Chi Jingyi/GT

Tencent and the National Astronomical Observatories (NAOC) will jointly launch a "star exploration plan" to apply artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to search for pulsars and explore the universe.

The joint plan will be based on the leading computer vision technology of Tencent lab and the leading computing capacity of Tencent Cloud, said Pony Ma Huateng, founder and CEO of Tencent through WeChat voice message, on Thursday on the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) held in Shanghai.

This is the second time he did not attend the WAIC in person. The hashtag "Pony Ma Huateng once again absent from WAIC" quickly went viral on Sina Weibo and ranked no.4 on the hot trend list.

Leveraging AI, Tencent Cloud can help process the huge data received from China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) and find pulsar clues through visual AI analysis.

Aerial photo taken on March 28, 2021 shows China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) under maintenance in southwest China's Guizhou Province. FAST has identified over 300 pulsars so far. Located in a naturally deep and round karst depression in southwest China's Guizhou Province, it officially began operating on Jan. 11, 2020. Photo: Xinhua

Computer vision is a field of AI that trains computers to interpret and understand information from digital images, videos and other visual inputs.  

"In the past year, AI has brought more and more convenience to life in areas such as medical care, urban governance and non-contact services. But in the field of AI, what is unknown remains greater than the known. We must make AI technology knowable, controllable, usable and reliable. We have to outsmart the increasingly powerful AI technology to keep it in hand," said Ma.

AI technology can not only go to "heaven," but also has broad application potential across the industrial economy and everyday life. At present, there are professional manufacturing enterprises in Shanghai that use Tencent's AI technology for quality inspection, in a bid to achieve cost reduction and efficiency increase, Ma added.

Global Times