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A national political advisor from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has suggested leading universities in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong could jointly establish an AI-powered digital sharing database for academics and scientific research, which can provide effective supporting resources to promote the development of national high-quality academic education.

The proposal was made by Hoffman Ma Ho-man, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and member of the Hong Kong Culture Association, who came to Beijing for the two sessions, China's annual key political event.

As a bridge and promoter of both Eastern and Western cultural and educational resources, Hong Kong has a responsibility to accelerate and support the academic and educational development of the country, enhancing its cultural soft power, Ma said in a proposal sent to the Global Times on Thursday.

Ma suggested the leading academic institutions such as Tsinghua and Peking universities from the mainland and leading universities from Hong Kong can set up a research team and cooperate in setting up a shared platform, with ChatGPT as a model. This can provide resources in different research fields to address the challenges of limited access and high thresholds for high-quality resources and information.

Universities in various subject areas can separately input their resources into the database to ensure a rich variety of resources, Ma said.

Considering that access to academic resources is often limited by geographical restrictions, language barriers, knowledge fragmentation, and even scientific accuracy issues, such a research mechanism could enable the public to truly enjoy high-quality information that meets their practical needs, providing effective complementary resources to promote the country's high-quality development.

This could not only lay a solid foundation for introducing higher education resources both from the mainland and Hong Kong to the platform but also enhance the universality of social resource distribution, Ma noted.

The platform can also adopt a value-added service (VAS) model, where users can enjoy basic free retrieval services while the platform offers additional value-added services as paid options. These services could include advanced retrieval functions, customized subject resource recommendations, exclusive subject forums, or online tutoring. Another option would be to introduce evaluation mechanisms and community interaction features to facilitate deeper subject discussions on the platform, promoting resource quality improvement.

This business model can ensure the sustainability of the platform's commercialization while safeguarding the free nature of basic services, according to Ma.

It could be helpful to utilize Hong Kong's advantages in international cultural education and exchanges to expand academic resources globally. By attracting international users and partners, the Chinese-developed digital platform could be further promoted to the international community, Ma said.

According to the proposal, to address the lack of human thought and ethical considerations in AI, joint research teams comprising talent from relevant fields in both the mainland and Hong Kong could conduct in-depth collaborative research on this issue, optimizing the reliability and practicality of the independently developed platform in the education sector.

Ma pointed out that optimizing the application of AI in academic education would ensure that it provides users with information that aligns more closely with human values.