The finals of the 2018 International Collegiate Competition for Brain-inspired Computing (ICCBC 2018) was successfully held at Tsinghua University on October 13th-14th, 2018.
It attracted over 300 teams from 84 universities and research institutes from China and abroad. The entries covered topics including hardware, algorithms, software, and applications. After a rigorous review, sixteen teams were selected by the committee to enter the finals. The committee is composed of professors and experts invited from Tsinghua University, Peking University, the University of Kent, the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT), the Communication University of China (CUC), Tianjin University, and Beijing Lingxi Mobile Communication Industry Technology Innovation Alliance.
At the beginning Xue Qikun, vice president of Tsinghua University, delivered a welcome address. On behalf of the host, he first introduced the background and aims of this contest, then expressed a gracious greeting to all guests and contestants, and finally set out the expectations of and his confidence in Tsinghua for this competition.
After that Professor Sun Maosong, vice president of Tsinghua Knowledge Intelligence Research Center, gave an academic report entitled “Essence of Application Lies in the Neural Connection: From Machine Translation to Poems’ Generation”. In it, he elaborated how research paradigm processing natural language has undergone a shift from the rule-based rationalism to the statistics-based empiricism, yet the current solely statistics-based neural networks are still unsuitable for handling tasks with multiple semantic meanings. Therefore, he argued that learning linguistic rules with high-frequency and integrating common sense into the neural networks might be an effective solution to this problem.
Later, another academic report entitled “Towards Artificial General Intelligence with Brain-inspired Computing” was delivered by Professor Luping Shi, director of Center for Brain-inspired Computing Research at Tsinghua University. Professor Shi first underscored the great success achieved by artificial intelligence in resolving simple static problems with certain or complete information; however, it remains difficult to solve complex dynamic problems with the uncertain or incomplete information that is associated with many systems. In terms of this problem, he argued that artificial general intelligence is one of the best solutions, and a solid way to develop artificial general intelligence is to advance the brain-inspired computing progress by combining brain science and information science.
On October 14th, contestants took part in the finals in defense session. Twelve teams illustrated and demonstrated their entries comprehensively in fifteen minutes after passing both the preliminaries and road shows. After the contestants’ brilliant defenses and the committee’s expert comments which lasting over six hours, the Innovation Grand Prize with a bonus of up to 300,000 RMB was won by the entry “Continual and Multi-task Learning Based on Contextual Signals” designed by a team from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Science.
After the award ceremony, Professor Huang Tiejun, director of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Peking University, commented that the scenarios in the application are diverse, the innovations in algorithms are infinite, and the designs on hardware are merited differently. He concluded that entries this year were more pertinent to the theme than last year, and the presentations of reports more coherent, logical and masterful—but there is still room for improvement in expression. Professor Huang pointed out that brain-inspired computing is a cutting-edge and interdisciplinary research field booming with opportunities, and encouraged everyone to leap out of their current frame of mind, to be brave, and to explore new research directions with a trail-blazing attitude. He thanked, especially, the Center for Brain-Inspired Computing Research at Tsinghua University for preventing their own students from participating in the interests of fairness, which offered a fair platform for the competition. Finally, in respect of the reviewing committee, Professor Huang expressed appreciation to Tsinghua University for organizing this internationally influential and representative competition in the field of brain-inspired computing.
