On the afternoon of May 22, the third Public Lectures of East China Normal University MEM, hosted by ECNU Shanghai International School of Chief Technology Officer (hereinafter referred to as “CTO School”) and co-organized by Shanghai Minhang District Committee Chunshen Pyramid Talent College, Shanghai Lingang Caohejing Talent Co., Ltd., Shanghai Pudong New Area Talent Market and China-Israel (Shanghai) Innovation Park, was successfully held in the form of a video livestreaming.
Wei Hongfeng, Distinguished Professor of Practice from CTO School and CEO of IntelliCloud, Li Yuan, Industry Mentor from CTO School and Senior Vice President of IntelliCloud and Prof. He Jiaxun, Executive Dean of CTO School, gave wonderful lectures successively on the theme of “Artificial Intelligence, Innovative Leadership and Career Advancement”.
At the beginning of the open class, Wei Hongfeng, distinguished practice professor of CTO School, gave a lecture entitled “Challenges and Opportunities of Innovation”. Wei Hongfeng pointed out that the essence of innovation is from 0 to 1, the process of concrete implementation of ideas to generate value. Innovation is a long way to go with obstacles, so it is necessary to carry out comprehensive and continuous verification of innovative ideas and value creation and finally make innovative ideas create value for society and life. Wei Hongfeng explained that innovation is a process of crossing the river by feeling for stones, which is full of uncertainties and challenges and needs to be constantly optimized based on the decision rule function and his own entrepreneurial experience in the metaverse. Science and technology are changing fast and there are opportunities for innovation. Lim (x→ A) F (x) = ∞ limit function shows that innovation is still a process and we hope that when innovation is in the right direction and continuous exploration can produce infinite value. Wei Hongfeng uses the following four examples to illustrate the opportunity of innovation from 0 to 1: The CryptoPunks project has become the foundation of the NFT digital art project, creating the business model of digital creation and product transaction and the lifestyle of digital life; Project Vegas Verse brings a completely different digital life to young people; Google's self-driving project will also give people a way of life they've never had before; Project X-Brain AGI is a general artificial intelligence platform created by IntelliCloud, hoping that AI can serve life and production and manufacturing in all walks of life.
Wei Hongfeng put forth six aspects for the challenges of innovation, namely the challenges from technology to product marketing, the challenges of rational allocation of human resources, the challenges of creating an innovative core value system to achieve good science and technology, the challenges of intellectual property protection, the challenges of data security and privacy protection, the challenges of environmental protection, energy conservation and emission reduction. To meet these challenges requires capability, courage and innovative management. Companies need to have hard-core technology and products and service launched to the market that can generate economic/social value. The essence of innovation is subversion and disruption, which will produce great value and also attach great risk. It needs courage to face the challenge of innovation. The management of innovation is more important. Without management, it is difficult for innovation to move from the laboratory to the public, production and life. Therefore, CTO School is also trying to transfer the concept of innovation management.
Next, Li Yuan, Industry Mentor of CTO School, gave a lecture entitled “Breaking the spell of difficult implementation of artificial intelligence with innovation”. Li Yuan took the application of machine vision, an important branch of artificial intelligence, in the industrial field as an example to share the problems encountered in the penetration of artificial intelligence into various industries and innovative solutions.
Li Yuan listed the five challenges that machine vision faces when landing in the industrial field and put forward the methodology of AI landing in response to the challenges. The five challenges are, respectively, scene migration challenge, fuzzy scene definition challenge, model precision challenge, abnormal sample scarcity challenge and massive sample demand challenge. In response to the five challenges, Li Yuan proposed a methodology for AI implementation-layered architecture, sealing complexity and open interfaces. The challenges of artificial intelligence can be comprehensively resolved by platforms and instruments for innovative technologies. In terms of responding to sample challenges, intelligent tagging reduces sample workload, common sense calculation active learning obtains effective samples, small sample learning algorithm reduces number of samples and metric learning reduces computation power demand and sample demand. In terms of dealing with algorithm challenges, service orchestration reduces the difficulty of algorithm application and advanced training algorithms are adopted and applied in the cloud platform. In terms of responding to the challenges of computing power, cloud/edge integrated deployment reduces network transmission pressure and cloud use costs and cluster tools are used to reasonably allocate computing resources. Taking the PaaS solution of IntelliCloud as an example, this systematic platform is divided into computing resource scheduling of the virtual layer to solve computing and scheduling problems, interlayer framework and platform layer to solve challenges such as sample collection, model training and accuracy assessment, and the operation layer to access user and external data to reduce the use threshold of artificial intelligence.
Li Yuan illustrated the application of innovative methods through six typical cases: in foreign body detection, small sample training is carried out through active learning and manual confirmation after common sense calculation to improve the accuracy of foreign body detection; in crack detection, a high-precision anomaly detection model is trained by neural network semi-supervised learning; in turbine engine detection, the semi-supervised small sample method is used to improve detection accuracy; the behavior feature is extracted by unsupervised small sample training in the monitoring of elderly hand raising behavior; multi-spectrum gun ball linkage realizes the monitoring function through thermal imager, sensor, software algorithm and soft control; multi-spectral fusion analysis can realize cross-check and validation of multiple sensors and algorithms and recognize pedestrians and vehicles by lidar and visible light.
Next, Prof. He Jiaxun, Executive Dean of CTO School, gave a lecture on “Innovative Leadership and CTO Degree Education”. Prof. He Jiaxun pointed out that CTO School was founded under the leadership of Qian Xuhong, President of ECNU and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The Master of Engineering Management (the CTO direction) program of the school is a new degree teaching program initiated under the “Excellent Education” overall education reform of the East China Normal University and the national strategy of innovation-driven development. The mission of the school is to “realize the social value of science and technology by people and technology synergy transformation”. The positioning of the school is to cultivate chief technology officers and the future technology-based strategy entrepreneurs with global vision and social mission, its core values is innovation changes the world and its objective and task is to shape the thinking, capabilities and patterns of technology and innovation management leaders. The school has successfully answered “Joseph Needham's Question” and “Qian Xuesen's Question” with innovative educational practices and explorations.
Professor He Jiaxun talked about the focus of CTO degree education around innovative leadership. Starting with Joseph Alois Schumpeter's famous work The Theory of Economic Development, he pointed out that the combination of technological innovation and business application is exactly the function of entrepreneurship and achieves economic growth through creative destruction, which is different from the idea of capital accumulation in classical economics. In the field of management, Peter F．Drucker proposed that the core of entrepreneurship is innovation, that is, constantly looking for changes and analyzing the innovation opportunities brought by changes, and carrying out purposeful and organized innovation. Nobel Economics Prize winner Edmund S. Phelps proposed a new economic growth theory and proved that national culture, personal values and national entrepreneurship are the source of innovation through the data of many countries, which is closely related to economic growth, different from the traditional growth driven by total factor productivity. The modern values such as breaking with tradition, enjoying challenges and exploring the unknown are important. Professor He Jiaxun believes that in the era of internet of everything, external customers and enterprises have better environmental conditions to create value, and employees’ active innovation is the embodiment of entrepreneurship.
Professor He Jiaxun pointed out that innovative leadership is the ability of leaders to promote and enhance employees' creativity and innovative behavior and is the core driving force of enterprise growth. CTOs are the most innovative senior management team members. Professor He believes that innovation leadership is embodied in six aspects: exploring enterprise growth, shaping innovation atmosphere, inspiring innovation vision, dual competence structure, stimulating employee creativity and improving the fit between organization and environment. To cultivate innovative leadership, the managers’ professional spirit should be transformed into an entrepreneurial spirit to achieve transformation and breakthrough in innovation path, innovation strategy, financial goal, business expansion and organizational motivation to adapt to the uncertain environment and have the courage to accept the challenge of economic growth pressure.
The East China Normal University MEM public lectures lasted nearly two hours and came to a successful close.