These two books about artificial intelligence appear on President Xi Jinping's bookshelf. (Photo/China Daily)
Two books on President Xi Jinping's shelf drew public attention from both home and abroad immediately after they were seen in the video of Xi's New Year speech.
The two books were about artificial intelligence－The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos and Brett King's Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane.
The Master Algorithm, published in 2015, describes how machine learning is remaking business, politics, science and war.
Augmented describes how society will be impacted by technologies that will change the world more in the next 20 years than it has been changed in the past 250 years.
The Business Insider said it is "interesting" that Xi has the two books on his bookshelf. It reflected China's ambition regarding AI, said the report.
A report published on the WeChat account of xuexixiaozu, which is operated by the overseas edition of People's Daily, labeled the two books as "newly published leading edge scientific books" among eight different categories of books on the president's bookshelf that appeared in the New Year address.
Innovation highlighted
The president has attached great importance to the development of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and big data in recent years. In his address to the 19th CPC National Congress, Xi called for more efforts to foster new areas of growth through further integration of the internet, big data and artificial intelligence with the real economy.
Speaking at a collective study session of the CPC Central Committee's Political Bureau in December, Xi said that the internet, big data, artificial intelligence and the real economy all should be interconnected.
Xi also emphasized the necessity of using big data to improve governance.
While inspecting a company in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, in December, Xi called for more innovation in the equipment manufacturing sector to accelerate China's drive toward becoming a manufacturing powerhouse and to bolster the real economy.
At Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group Co Ltd, a leading domestic manufacturer, Xi was briefed about the company's intelligent assembly lines and big data platform.
"Innovation is the source of business core competitiveness," Xi said. He urged a shift from "Made in China" to "Created in China".
Innovation ranks first among the Five Concepts of Development raised by Xi as the drive of a new kind of economic growth, along with the other four concepts of coordination, environment, openness and sharing.
In a signed article in German media ahead of his state visit to Germany in July, Xi called on the two countries to deepen practical cooperation in such fields as innovation, the internet and smart manufacturing.
The G20 Hangzhou Summit, held in East China's Zhejiang province in 2016, adopted the Blueprint on Innovative Growth and formulated a specific action plan. Wu Fei, head of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at Zhejiang University, said that as general secretary of the CPC Central Committee and president, Xi has set a visionary tone for China's AI development, which is to turn into a global AI leader in the coming 15 years.
"President Xi has said that AI will definitely change the world and society, so we should take the opportunities," Wu said.
