Parallel Economics: From Artificial Intelligence to Intelligent and Smart Economy
Guest Lecture and Open AMA by Prof. Fei-Yue Wang at Prof. Luyao Zhang's Course: Intelligent Economics: An Explainable AI Approach, Duke Kunshan University
Note: unfortunately, the event was not recorded due to unexpected technique failures. We will organize another in-person event for Prof. Fei-Yue Wang once the covid-19 situation permits.
Speaker Short Bio:
State special appointed expert and director of the State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Director of China Economic and Social Security Research Center in University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dean of Qingdao Academy of Intelligent Industries. His research interest covers methods and applications for parallel systems, social computing, parallel intelligence, and knowledge automation.
Speaker Longer Bio:
Fei-Yue Wang (S'87–M'89–SM'94–F'03) received his Ph.D. degree in computer and systems engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA, in 1990. He joined The University of Arizona in 1990 and became a Professor and the Director of the Robotics and Automation Laboratory and the Program in Advanced Research for Complex Systems. In 1999, he founded the Intelligent Control and Systems Engineering Center at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China, under the support of the Outstanding Chinese Talents Program from the State Planning Council, and in 2002, was appointed as the Director of the Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, CAS. In 2011, he became the State Specially Appointed Expert and the Director of the State Key Laboratory for Management and Control of Complex Systems.
His current research focuses on methods and applications for parallel intelligence, social computing, and knowledge automation. He is a fellow of INCOSE, IFAC, ASME, and AAAS. In 2007, he received the National Prize in Natural Sciences of China and became an Outstanding Scientist of ACM for his work in intelligent control and social computing. He received the IEEE ITS Outstanding Application and Research Awards in 2009 and 2011, respectively. In 2014, he received the IEEE SMC Society Norbert Wiener Award. Since 1997, he has been serving as the General or Program Chair of over 30 IEEE, INFORMS, IFAC, ACM, and ASME conferences. He was the President of the IEEE ITS Society from 2005 to 2007, the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, USA, in 2005, the American Zhu Kezhen Education Foundation from 2007 to 2008, the Vice President of the ACM China Council from 2010 to 2011, the Vice President and the Secretary General of the Chinese Association of Automation from 2008-2018. He was the Founding Editor-in-Chief (EiC) of the International Journal of Intelligent Control and Systems from 1995 to 2000, the IEEE ITS Magazine from 2006 to 2007, the IEEE/CAA JOURNAL OF AUTOMATICA SINICA from 2014-2017, and the China's Journal of Command and Control from 2015-2020. He was the EiC of the IEEE Intelligent Systems from 2009 to 2012, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON Intelligent Transportation Systems from 2009 to 2016, and is the EiC of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS since 2017, and the Founding EiC of China's Journal of Intelligent Science and Technology since 2019. Currently, he is the President of CAA's Supervision Council, IEEE Council on RFID, and Vice President of IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society.
Reflection Letters to Prof. Feiyue-Wang by Students at Duke Kunshan University
By Xuejun Zhang (Katie) 张雪珺
Dear Professor Wang,
Thank you for your inspiring speech from Wednesday at ECON 211 class. I’m writing this email to ask a follow-up question regarding your field of expertise and my research. First, let me introduce myself briefly. I’m Xuejun Zhang and I’m a junior student majoring in Data Science from Duke Kunshan University. I’m interested in the application of machine learning technology to real-life applications so that people’s life quality can be improved. I was inspired by your speech, especially when you mentioned: “five forces in one for intelligent technology” (the graph shown in the attachment). You showed us the star-shaped graph where New IT (intelligent technologies) is in the center and five forces including data, computing, algorithms, networking, and blockchain surround and support it. I’ve always known the importance of data, computing, and algorithms, but I have rarely thought about the determining forces of blockchain and networking. Your speech inspires me to think about all five of the elements that are essential for intelligent technology to thrive.
I am also very interested in the development of intelligent technologies and the application of those technologies to improve the quality of our daily life. The topic for my signature work project is AI music generation. It is related to your research in the way that it also exploits the idea of intelligent technologies to further the development of the smart economy. I have a question regarding how to apply your research idea of parallel intelligence. From what I understand of your research on ACP, it means “artificial societies” plus “computational experiments” plus “parallel execution”. In my signature work research of developing an AI music generator, I believe the artificial societies here mean the algorithms and datasets that enable the process of generating music by AI. I also plan to do computational experiments both through comparing the results of some computational evaluation metrics and comparative experiments. I’m still confused about how to “parallel execute” the model. Could you please give me some suggestions on how to “parallel execute” this project by exploiting the blockchain economy?
Thank you so much for your time in giving us the talk. I benefited a lot from it. Hope to hear
from you and even see you on the DKU campus one day!
Best, Xuejun Zhang (Katie) 张雪珺
Undergraduate Student | Class of 2022
By Yihan Zhu
Dear professor Wang,
I am Yihan Zhu, a junior student majoring in Data Science from Duke Kunshan University. With a background knowledge of mathematics, statistics, and computer science, I am very interested in Business Analytics, Fintech, Finance, and Consulting as well. I am writing to thank you for your wonderful sharing in our ECON211 class and ask you a question from my signature work that is relevant to your research area. As a data science student, your definition and explanation about parallel are very creative and attractive for me. The three steps, from small data to big data, then to deep intelligence, offered me a clear structure of the AlphaGo thesis. You mentioned that computers use machine learning from big data, then offered us small data and let us choose the best one. This is also how people interact with the computer, with artificial intelligence. In addition, the three ITs, industrial technology, information technology, and intelligent technology, showed us how IT changes from the development of society, economy, and technology. Last but not the least, the connection between blockchain and the concept of DAO is something I never thought about before, which did inspire me to learn more about interdisciplinary studies of AI, economics, and philosophy. From your previous research, I found that you did a lot of research related to machine learning, including neural networks, deep reinforcement learning, etc. Actually, I really desire to do research that connects machine learning with finance and the stock market. Let me take this chance to briefly introduce my signature work to you. For my signature work, I am going to compare the performance of different asset valuation methods in informing investment decisions by Pearson correlation coefficient. Meanwhile, I am going to focus on the data from 30 large-cap companies which are included by The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). In addition, I found you scanned the issue of Comparative Analysis of Feature Selection Algorithms in your lecture paper, including the Pearson correlation coefficient which I am going to use in my research. Therefore, depending on this, I would like to ask questions that how the performance of the Pearson correlation coefficient is compared to other algorithms and what kind
of feature selection algorithms you recommend me to use in my research?
Thank you so much for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Yihan Zhu
By Haoxin Yu
Dear Professor Wang,
Thank you for giving us an encouraging lecture this week! I’m Haoxin Yu, a junior student of Duke Kunshan University, majoring in Data Science. I’m writing this email because I was inspired by what you shared with us and have some new thoughts in my mind. I’m extremely interested in the three steps you have mentioned in the lecture, which is one of the patterns of the AlphaGo Thesis, from small data to big data to deep intelligence. As far as I know, deep learning methods are extensively applied to various fields of science and engineering, such as image classifications, learning methods in language processing, speech recognition, etc. In addition, big data analytics requires new and sophisticated algorithms based on machine and deep learning techniques to process data in real-time with high accuracy and efficiency. Deep learning can also be used to dig volume of data to automatically identify patterns and extract features from complex unsupervised data without the involvement of human. Apart from this part, I found it really insightful to connect AI and intelligent economy with philosophy concepts like DAO. I once took a course called “The Philosophy of AI” at DKU and had a basic understanding of how they may connect with each other. It’s common to see that AI related technologies may touch on issues of ethics, humanity and privacy, such as intelligent robot, smartphones. Also, for example, I remembered you mentioned 6 security features of blockchain in presenting your research and privacy protection is one of them. Thus, I think it necessary and crucial to connect some ancient philosophy concepts with the emerging AI technologies in order to endow them with cultural value and moral constraints. Another thing in your research that drew my interest was the parallel economics. Actually, what I have been doing for my signature work is something related to intelligent economy. My work is associated with a concept of green finance – ESG. ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Since investors are increasingly applying these non-financial factors as part of their analysis process to identify material risks and growth opportunities, ESG has becoming an emerging topic and therefore, many ESG index institutions appear. During the first stage of my research, I mainly focus on the simulation of two well-known ESG Rating Models from MSCI and RepRisk. I think it, to some extent, has some correlations with the mechanism of using artificial economic system to form parallel systems with actual economic systems, which you addressed in your research. Since there are limitations with the actual circumstances and the number of possible situations is large, we can first extract from the big data “small” or deep intelligence for a specific economic problem using machine learning or other AI methods, then generate a closed loop between actual and artificial economic systems. I was impressed that the concepts and methods that you covered in this lecture were novel but also rational. I just noticed that you mentioned the parallel data from the area of big data to data intelligence, and according to the framework, you used the actual data to generate artificial data. For this part, I have a question that how this process would be like, for example, what kinds of features that we may extract from the actual data to generate artificial data? If we know the principle of the systems, can we first create some artificial data and use it to predict and compare with the actual data? Thanks again for giving us such insightful lecture! Hope I may have a chance to have a face-to-face conversation with you in the future!
Best,
Haoxin Yu
Ie Huan Chong
Hello Professor Wang,
I am Ie Huan Chong, an Economics student at Duke Kunshan University who attended your seminar on Parallel Economics. I was greatly inspired by your proposition that Industries and Grids 5.0, through intelligent technology, can integrate existing and well-established knowledge fields (physical, social, artificial, mental, etc.) Often artificial intelligence is conceptualised as the next step in IT (Information Technology), but the proposition of Intelligent Technology as a means of integrating our accumulated knowledge in Industrial and Information Technology is novel and very interesting. I was also interested by the distinction between Newton and Merton in data. The explanability of our models is often constrained by the nature of our methodology (big data, small laws or small data, big laws). To create models that integrate both method types is precisely what we must strive to do, not only to expand our horizons in academia, but also to create the most efficient solutions for contemporary problems. My career prospects and vocational interests are heavily connected to the idea of Parallel IT and Economics. I am interested in Business Strategy, Supply-Chain Optimisation, and Finance Optimisation. Often in these vocations, tried and true methods are implemented without much criticism and are often narrow in scope, such as the continued prevalence of regression-based models in finance. It will take more than intelligence and a capability to create a parallel model to revolutionise these fields; it will take guts to go against the grain of traditional methods. At the moment, I am working on developing an explainable carbon price prediction model, a topic that falls between the intersections of politics, economics and environmental science. All three approaches from industry technology, information technology and intelligent technology can help our explanation of this. Models can focus on predicting emissions loads and energy consumption based on industry technology, regression and factor price-based models rooted in information technology, and lastly game-theory and human-decision replicating methods from intelligent technology. Based on your knowledge of this field, which approach or hybrid approach can best model our predictions for carbon price?
Thank you for your inspiration and time, I hope to hear from you soon!
Best regards,
Ie Huan Chong
By Ray Zhu 朱家昇
Dear Professor Wang,
Happy New Year!
My name is Jiasheng Zhu (Ray), and I’m a junior student (the inaugural class) majoring in economics and political economy at Duke Kunshan University. Thanks for delivering such an amazing talk in our Intelligent Economics course on Wednesday! Your presentation inspired me a lot and I am writing to share my insights. I would like to collaborate with you in any form possible in the further!
To start with, let me briefly introduce myself. Thanks to the liberal arts education and the global community at Duke Kunshan University (DKU), I have developed strong interdisciplinary abilities and cross-cultural communication skills in tackling problems in work and real-life besides holding a major GPA of 4.00. I have solid knowledge accumulated from courses in economics, political economy, math, behavioral finance, statistics, and computer science. Your speech has greatly inspired me. This is the first time I systematically and formally touch on the concepts about the parallel economy, although I only got to see a tip of a giant iceberg due to the time limit. However, your brief introduction has already shown the large potentials of interdisciplinary study and applications. You elaborately combine philosophy, big data, economy, physics, and many other disciplines to either explain or contribute the theoretical framework. Moreover, you always put your theories under the big context of history, which helped us a lot to understand complicated but sophisticated ideas. This is so amazing! Besides, the idea of parallel IT, which includes both the independence, intersectionality, and integration of industrial technology, information technology, and intelligent technology, has especially impressed me. I am strongly feeling that we are moving to a new era.
Prof. Luyao is both my advisor and signature work mentor. With her help, I built the Virtual Behavioral Lab at DKU last year and now take the position of lab manager. Prof. Luyao and I also collaborated in founding SciEcon Research Accelerator earlier this year. We are now researching AI and fintech. We use big data and experimental methods to answer fundamental economic questions and promote its further application scope. Just as you emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary methods, I also try to combine standard economics with fintech, experiments, big data, behavioral science, and many yet to explore. I know Prof. Wang has made great contributions in applying intelligent systems and blockchain to various areas, including but not limit to transportation, military affairs, urban management, medicine, education, and even smart home. If you have any research opportunity or internships which could help me further understand how to apply blockchain, fintech, and interdisciplinary skills to real practice, I would appreciate it a lot and would like to accept it without hesitation!
Last, I want to ask a question related to my signature work. Recently, Prof. Luyao and I designed a crossover experiment about Ethereum Investment to answer whether delegate investment decision to AI is a better choice for human beings. I wonder, how would you reply to this question based on your insights about AI investment? Could you tell me what are the special advantages of AI investment compared to a human investor? I think your unique insights would definitely inspire me to polish some details of my experiments. Thank you!
Look forward to your reply!
Best wishes,
Ray Zhu 朱家昇
Kaiyuan Liu
Dear Professor Fei-Yue Wang,
Thanks a lot for providing us with today’s wonderful presentation about Parallel Economics. It is my great honor to listen to your insightful vision of “Industries 5.0”, which impressed me very much. I’m Kaiyuan Liu, a junior student who majors in Data Science at Duke Kunshan University. Besides exploring the world of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), I’m also curious about interdisciplinary studies and applications of both Data Science and Economics. Impressed a lot by your presentation, I’m writing to further ask for your insights into your research. I’m shocked by your supposition that we are going into a parallel society where the actual and artificial aspects co-exist. This reveals the great evolution from “Old IT” to “New IT” and the fact that we are moving our focus from the material world to the human intelligence world. Moreover, I’m impressed by your argument that we are creating a cyber-physical social system in Industries 5.0, which suggests that we are attaching more importance to social factors. These points give me great inspiration and elicit my intense curiosity in my future study.
Recently, I’m working on my Signature Work, which aims to create an automated trading strategy characterized by Explain AI in both the stock and cryptocurrency market. Surprisingly, I find some connections and inspiration from your study. Firstly, my study intends to apply AI to those markets to help investors make decisions intelligently and automatically, which coincides with your idea of “Intelligent Connectivity Technology” in “Industries 5.0”. Secondly, my research will involve multiple social factors, such as macro-policies, a company’s operation, etc., which resonates with your special consideration of social connectivity. I learned a lot from your interpretation of the charming vision. But I’m still kind of confused about what role these social factors play in your “Parallel Intelligence” vision. So could you please tell me how these social factors are involved and influence “Parallel Intelligence”? I believe that youranswer will certainly offer me both profound insights into your research and great inspiration on how to involve social factors in my Signature Work.
Again, many thanks for your presentation today. I would be appreciated it if you can answer my question and give me some great insights. I’m looking forward to your early reply!
Sincerely,
Kaiyuan Liu
By Lian
Dear Professor Fei-Yue Wang:
My name is Lian Zeng. And I am a junior in Duke Kunshan university and majoring in Data science. I participated your wonderful lecture Professor Luyao Zhang held on March 3rd. Thanking you for bringing us a lot innovative idea. I am writing this email mainly to ask you for further advice. You introduced us the idea of parallel IT. Our society will enter into a parallel society where the actual and the artificial interact. You also highlighted that new technology, intelligent technologies, is to solve the problem of human intelligence asymmetry, instead the old ones who are solving the problem of resource asymmetry in human development. And you also connected the technology with Chinese philosophy Dao. In intelligent technology, Dao is the abbreviation of decentralized, autonomous and organized. And blockchain which can help build trust in the intelligent economy are most likely to become the footstone of building the DAO of intelligent economy and smart society. Actually, I am doing a project on blockchain and my research question is how does risk attitude differ among stake holders in adopting blockchain to supply chain. We know that there are many advantages when using blockchain technology and I wonder is any disadvantages or risks if we apply blockchain to the real cases in society or not.
Thanks again for your excellent speech and hope we can see you on campus one day.
Best wishes,
Lian
Sabhyata Jha
Dear Prof. Wang,
I hope this email finds you well. Thank you for your gracing us with your presentation on March 3, 2021. I hope we have a chance to have you on campus in the future. I am a second-year undergraduate student at Duke Kunshan University. As a Data Science major, I found your talk enlightening in many regards and the idea of the Internet of Minds and the anecdote behind it resonated to be metasyntactic for the direction our age is headed.
While you painted the overarching destination for us as a society, I am intrigued by the peripheral issues that we tend to overlook while moving ahead. For instance, the integration of ethics in our intelligent technologies may not take center stage in the discussion, but its importance is indisputable if we want these intelligent technologies to stick with us long term. My latest research proposal intends to have this discussion from the perspective of the consumer, but I am concerned that the power dynamics that are so tilted in the favor of corporations who may have no interest in the trade-off that comes with the integration of ethics into AI.
So, I wanted to ask you as we move from artificial intelligence to an intelligent and smart economy, and subsequently commoditize our attention and trust, how do we bring reasonable concerns about the ethics of commercializing attention and trust without being left out of the intelligent connectivity technology revolution?
As an admirer of your ability to connect the details and paint the broad strokes of these novel ideas, my concerns reflect my desire to be excited about these advancements. I would be very keen and grateful to hear your thought on this.
Looking forward to your response in anticipation.
Sincerely,
Sabhyata Jha
Class of 2023
Xingqi
Hi Professor Fei-Yue Wang,
Hope everything goes well.
Thank you so much for giving us such an inspiring and informative speech. I am Xingqi Dai, a junior major in Political Economy / Economics at Duke Kunshan University. I have worked as an intern in a fund management company and a student teaching assistant in a computer science course. I am interested in the interdisciplinary research of Economics and Data Science. You have mentioned that once the “Dao” of the blockchain and the knowledge robot system on this “Dao” are established, attention and trust will become a new commodity of intelligent economy, and they are two kinds of scarce resources in the modern economic system. They are the new commodity, new space, and new margin. In the future, the blockchain will consist of an attention machine and a trust machine. This part is impressing. I have taken courses in economics and computer science. I would like to choose a career related to business analytics. I believe that there will be some connections between business analytics and the knowledge robots mentioned by you. I will be honored if I could learn more about the knowledge robots and know whether there are any research opportunities in your lab. The part about trust and attention commodity has inspired me, which is helpful to my signature work. Could you talk more about its business model and market demand?
Thank you very much for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Xingqi
Xinyu Tian
Dear Professor Wang,
Thank you so much for your wonderful speech about the parallel economics on our class! I hope everything with you is good! I am a sophomore student from Duke Kunshan University studying data science and economics. It was my pleasure to attend your lecture “Parallel Economics: From Artificial Intelligence to Intelligent and Smart Economy” and I was super inspired by your wisdom and insights about this topic. Therefore, I am writing this email to explain some of my ideas related to the concept of parallel economics and my personal academic work. As you have put forward in your speech, there are three “ITs” corresponding to Karl Popper’s Three Worlds Theory, which indicates “Industrial Technology” for the physical world, “Information Technology” for the mental world, and the “Intelligent Technology” for the artificial world. It was the first time that I heard about these concepts, but I found them quite interesting and useful in my interdisciplinary study of data science. As what I have understood, the change of the three worlds and the flow of their corresponding technologies demonstrate the tendency that human optimized the primitive tools and tried to create higher intelligence. These concepts have combined the development of human society and technologies from the perspective of ethics and indicated other changing issues related to it. This point has reminded me of the reason why I chose to study data science and economics. I believe that although the world is changing rapidly from an industrial one to an intelligent one, there are still people and places in poverty and behind the times. By studying data science and economics, and learning from a diverse environment like Duke Kunshan University, I will be fully equipped with advanced knowledge and skills and thus be able to offer help. As long as the overall world tendency is to become more intelligent and efficient, our missions are to help the weaker ones while strengthen the powerful ones. And this is also the reason that I am currently working on model optimization. I am so sure that we can bring the whole world to a brighter future with higher civilization by the regeneration of technologies and using them to help the behind ones. I really appreciate your speech, and may I ask what is your deeper insights about how the society will develop to understand and get used to the highly developed intelligent technologies and artificial world?
Thank you so much for your time and patience. I really hope to see you one day on our campus and welcome to Duke Kunshan University! I am looking forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,
Xinyu Tian
By Yifan Song
Dear Professor Wang,
My name is Yifan Song, and I am a junior student from Duke Kunshan University, majoring in Data Science. On May 3, Wednesday, I attended the seminar Parallel Economics: From Artificial Intelligence to Intelligent and Smart Economy, featuring you, which inspired me a lot. So I am writing in reference to thank you for giving such an amazing seminar and enquire about your advice on my current signature work project.
In your seminar, you introduced the parallel technologies and Karl Popper’s theory, connecting AI with philosophy. It indicates intelligent technologies are replacing information technologies and industrial technologies. And the intellectual asymmetry it has brought triggers new opportunities as well as challenges. I think this is an insight with great significance and it inspires me to reflect on the ethics of AI and how we can utilize AI technology safely in economics to build a positive sum-world.
This topic interests me a lot also because it is closely related to the research project I am doing right now. My project tries to answer the question “how does the application of explainable AI affect customers’ choice in insurance” through a statistical approach, in which I will give a detailed discussion on how AI affects a specific area of people’s lives and how people react to it, as well as what this react implies. The ethics of AI in economics and financial services and how we can leverage off the potential of AI and understand the risk it brings is an important topic to my research.
Since your expertise focuses on the intelligent economy, I would like to ask that whether you think trusting AI in insurance industry is a good idea, as the usage of AI in the insurance companies increases information asymmetry and intellectual asymmetry to some extent that puts the customer at a disadvantage. This question can be extended even broader to the general financial service industry. I would appreciate it if you could give me some advice on my project or some information related to this topic in your research.
Thank you so much for your patience and for your time! I look forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
Student Yifan
By Ziqiao Ao
Dear Prof. Feiyue Wang:
I hope this email finds you well. Thank you for your wonderful speak last Friday! I'm Ziqiao Ao, a junior year student majoring in Data Science at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) and am doing research in FinTech with AI and Big Data. I'm writing this email to sincerely ask for some advice on my current research. I was impressive about the knowledge involved in your research. For me, they are all very advanced and leading explorations and achievements in the field of Intelligent Economy, and I believe they will inspire scholars in this field to a large extent. One of the concepts you raised about “Parallel Technologies”, which calls for more than integration of the industrial, information and intelligent technology, really inspires me a lot. In fact, this gained me a deeper consciousness when doing research and promoted me to have a deeper ultimate goal of research, that is, how to realize the deeper interaction and communication of physical products, spiritual products and artificial virtual products in research, so that they are independent of each other and can be smoothly integrated. I believe this new sense of the final product of my research is bound to make a great difference in my future study.
The research I'm doing now is actually in the field of Intelligent Economy, specifically Fintech and blockchain. I am trying to set up an evaluation system for Ethereum Smart Contracts (ESC) by utilizing the Explainable AI Model, which will increase the user experience and facilitate the stability, security, and usability of ESC. Therefore, it really impressed me a lot when you talked about “social intelligence needs the force of blockchain”, and your prospective and unique interpretation of technical features of blockchain TRUE and DAO. You regarded blockchain as the combination of trust machines and truth machines, which is actually the focus in my study how to strengthen the security and trust of blockchain by evaluating the smart contracts, thus affirming the significance of my research, so as to strengthen my determination to continue.
I actually have some questions in mind, which I think your suggestion will be of extreme help. Firstly, how specifically should I turn trust and attention into a product of my research? Also, for the three levels of knowledge robots you mentioned, is there a way for me to combine them with my research? I am very eager to get your advice, which can help me better develop my research.
Thanks for your time, and I look forward to hearing back from you.
Best Regards,
Ziqiao Ao
Lewis
Dear Prof. Wang,
Thanks for your brilliantly insightful lecture! My name is Lewis Tian and I am currently a Junior studying Data Science at Duke Kunshan University. I am passionate about the advancement of artificial intelligence and its incredible capability ofsolving complex real world problems. Inspired by your talk, I’m writing to share with you my signature work on ESG, a concept of responsible investing, using data science techniques.
There were a lot of interesting points you mentioned in the presentation, but the one that strikes me the most is the idea of big 5G, and the general idea of parallelism is very interesting and applicable in many scenarios as well. We are currently at G4, Internet of Things, and its applications in society has already brought our productivity to the next level. Then I can’t help but imagine what “Internet of Minds” would be like. I believe with the progress in neuroscience and engineering (e.g. Neuralink), the brain-machine interface would greatly improve human’s cognitive ability and facilitate knowledge communication and cooperation. And I believe IoM is going to contributes to a true paradigm shift into what you defined as “Cyber-Physical-Social Systems” (CPSS), which can benefit society by more effectively coordinate integrate information, physical, and social resources (Wang et al. 2018). With the help of IoM, we can achieve parallel system (virtual and real) that can solve complex problems in real-time more effectively as human cognition is involved. Going even further in IoM, some currently “fictional” scenes like digitizing and uploading consciousness are not so far fetched anymore.
As a data science student, my interest lies at the intersection of technology and finance. It is amazing how technology like blockchain empowers the decentralized finance to overcome some obstacles that traditional finance struggles at. As witness to this FinTech revolution, my interest in this area is in line with some of your novel research in blockchain and its applications. Admittedly, blockchain and applications built upon it are great, but it has been criticized by some scholars for its enormous and somewhat inefficient energy consumption. As you also mentioned, we are striving toward building the “6S” world, and Sustainability as one of them certainly cannot be understated, especially in the vastly applied blockchain technology. And sustainability in company growth and FinTech area is my research interest as well. This brings me to a question regarding my signature work research.
My current research focuses on Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), a popular investing concept that integrates company’s non-financial performance with traditional financial analysis. There is an ongoing debate on whether ESG really indicates companies’ financial performance and in turn a valuable and informative metric to consider. For the next stage of the project, I plan to investigate the sustainability of firms that incorporate blockchain technology and possibly ICO companies. So I’m wondering if you could share some insights on the sustainable development future of blockchain technology and how would that affect those companies’ valuation.
Best
Lewis
Ziang Zhou (Alfred) 周子昂
Hi Professor Wang,
First of all, thanks for your insightful talk you gave on Professor Luyao’s class. My name is Ziang Zhou, I am a Junior at Duke Kunshan University majoring in Data Science. I was one of the audiences in your talk, I am writing to share some of my thoughts inspired by your talk and a little about my research.
There are so many highlights in your talk. To name one, I was very inspired by the third IT, Intelligent Times, of the three ITs you mentioned. You then analyzed the five forces and the five spaces. In the five forces you mentioned, you connect Chinese traditional philosophy to heated technology—blockchain, by introducing the mutual essence lying in “TRUE DAO”. This was so mind-refreshing that it inspired me to include philosophy as a dimension of my future research. My research has some connections to your researches. In your talk, you mentioned the new principle of the current world is “Big Data, Small Laws”. My researches mainly focus on revealing information from paralinguistic features by utilizing deep learning methods. It perfectly fits the “Big Data” rule, since we often have more than enough data for training use, and our purpose is to find the “Small Rules”, or limited patterns lying under the data. I didn’t realize this was so insightful until I connect your talk with my research. It was so amazing! Last but not least, I have a question regarding my signature work that I think your expertise in AI will provide valuable advice. My Signature Work is about creating a Bird Sound Identification System in Guangdong Province, which aims at recognizing bird species based on their sound. I noticed that you mentioned a workflow in the “Big Data Analytics and DPP” part, “Speak with Data -> Predict the Future -> Create the Future”. For now, I believe that I have successfully analyzed the data (Speak with Data) and tailored my training methods according to the data, and obtained a robust classifier(Predict the Future), what can I do in this project so that I can reach the “Create the Future” purpose?
I sincerely appreciate your time to read my words. Looking forward to your reply and further
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