Tsinghua panel calls for collaboration in AI to combat Covid-19 as US limits access to some Chinese scholars

Academics from top universities in the US and China have called for more collaboration in artificial intelligence research as US-China tech tensions continue to escalate and the increased use of AI during the Covid-19 pandemic raises data privacy concerns.

“We need to cooperate with one another instead of fighting … no country can achieve peace and security as long as one single country is not safe,” Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, said during an online panel hosted by Tsinghua on Tuesday.

The discussion comes as the Trump administration increasingly limits Chinese access to advanced American research amid rising tensions and a tech rivalry between the two countries. The US government said this month it would cancel the visas of visiting Chinese students and researchers if they had direct ties with the People’s Liberation Army.

Separately, two Chinese universities found they were prohibited from using US software engineering platform MATLAB due to “recent US government regulations”.

These recent actions have many companies and scientists in the AI industry worried about the pace of future innovation as much of the groundbreaking work in the field has come from Chinese researchers working for American institutions.

Chinese-educated researchers comprised nearly one-third of the authors of papers accepted and promoted at the influential Neural Information Processing Systems AI conference last year, more than from any other country, according to US think tank MacroPolo. Most of the Chinese researchers lived in the US and worked for American companies and universities, so decisions to broadly block Chinese talent could undermine the American lead in AI, according to a new report from the think tank.