‘Soft robots’ and ‘mobile secretaries’ coming soon, says Hong Kong university working with China’s WeChat on artificial intelligence projects

A university in Hong Kong has teamed up with Tencent’s popular mobile messaging app WeChat to expand its research in artificial intelligence and big data.

Researchers from four departments at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) will be granted access to a trove of public data generated by the Chinese app’s 650 million active users and tens of thousands of official accounts.

Access to WeChat’s data is an important step for the university as an increasing amount of data is held by companies like Facebook or Google for in-house research, thus limiting the access granted to scholars, according to Professor Yang Qiang, head of the HKUST-WeChat Joint Laboratory on Artificial Intelligence (WHAT LAB).

“By joining with WeChat we can be ahead again because we have young students here who are very good in theory, can build models, but unless they are tested and trained on real data they are not much use,” Yang said.

Artificial intelligence is a growing area of focus for technology companies with Google, Facebook and Microsoft each having their own AI-dedicated labs to develop personal assistants or translate conversations made over Skype.

At least 10 WeChat fellowships for PhD students will be created under the WHAT LAB project allowing students to test their models using real-life data provided by the messaging app.