Peking University, Oct. 22, 2019: "Technology the key, Market the land." This is what Gao Liangcai has bear in mind for the past 14 years’ research at Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking Univesity.
This sentence was proposed by Wang Xuan who believes that the high-tech industry should constantly pursue new breakthroughs in technology as well as apply such technology widely. Meeting the former requirement facilitates meeting the latter, and in turn, the new user demand from the market can further promote technological innovation and breakthroughs.
“The Institute focuses on application-oriented technology innovation.” During his Ph.D. study, Gao Liangcai began to participate in the research and development of the company's products.
The first project that Gao participated in was “E-book publishing system based on digital copyright protection”, in which he was responsible for the display and automatic rearrangement of tables and formulas in documents on mobile devices. Gao used to go to work at 7:00, wrote code and modified bugs in the morning; in the afternoon and evvning, he read literatures and worked on his doctoral thesis.
After the product was marketed, it quickly became popular and was applied to more than 87% of the publishing houses in the country, 2 foreign publishing houses, more than 3,800 libraries, and more than 150 overseas libraries. The product won the second prize of 2009 National Science and Technology Progress Award, and Gao Liang was the only student winner.
"Seeing the outcome of my study on the market is still quite fulfilling." Gao Liangcai learned from this experience that computer technology is an applied science, and the application results must withstand the test of the market were it to have a practical effect on society.
“When Wang Xuan was almost 60 years old, he often discussed technical details with others and never left the front line of research.” Gao always remembered the words of Professor Tang Zhi, his doctoral tutor and also Wang Xuan’s student,.
Writing codes and reading literatures have also become the center of Gao’s life after he stayed in the Institute. "Be sure to keep writing code before you are 40 years old." he said.
In recent years, in keeping with the needs of national social and scientific development, Gao Liangcai has gradually turned to research in the field of artificial intelligence.
After the financial documents, medical cases, and papers are converted into electronic documents, the large number of charts and formulas, where useful information and knowledge abound, can be transformed to smart documents through recognition extraction or semantic mining. For example, computer scientists could cooperate with hospitals to carry out smart medical treatment, identify and analyze cases, and compare the diseases, to provide assistance for doctors and patients.
Gao Liangcai has made continuous progress in the fields of text recognition technology, form or ticket identification, formula recognition and retrieval, in-depth paper plagiarism detection technology, layout understanding and automatic layout design, document metadata extraction, etc. The related products have been applied in systems such as financial big data system and smart education. He was also named Beijing Science and Technology New Star in 2015.
"We have to learn from Wang Xuan who shares the spirit of ‘Dare to be the first, never to be satisfied’.” While focusing on the technology, Gao always kept vigilant about technological development. Now that the Internet start-ups are on the rise, he often receives people from venture captital and industry professionals who are seeking cooperation.
“What we need to do is to promote the truly useful research in the relevant industries. There are not many artificial intelligence technologies that are really coming to the market. Many basic problems remain to be solved, such as the interpretability and generalization ability of deep learning technology. We still have a long way to go." Gao said.
During the interview, Gao also enthusiastically introduced the achievements made by his colleagues in their respective fields: the team has developed the “Digital Asset Management System for Newspapers” and “Research and Application of Digital Audio and Video Control Technology”, and also won the second prize of National Scientific and Technological Progress Awards. In the field of smart media, they promote AI word-formation technology - "A person can write a few dozen words, then the computer can imitate his style and write other words, that is, a personalized word bank is generated automatically”. They also promote smart reporters capable to complete the whole process of interviewing, writing, editing, and publishing. This technology has been used in the Rio Olympic Games and is adopted by Toutiao and other newspapers.
"It has always been my aspiration to let scientific research serve the public. I may never reach the height of Wang Xuan. However, I have been working hard to change some aspects of an industry and hope to make the difference. When I retire, I hope there would be occasions where someone raises a topic and says, “This was achieved by Gao Liangcai .”
Written by: Yang Yanfan
Edited by: Wang Xi
Source: PKU News(Chinese)
