ITU INTERVIEWS @ ITU AI for Good Global Summit: Hui Zhang, CTO, KUKA

Thank you.

I think it is very important. In a way, you know, AI is just in the starting field, a period of getting into the industry and getting into our society. As a robotics and automation company like Kuka, we felt that it's important to have transparency and dialogue with other companies in the industry, with academics, and also with government bodies, because as a new field of technology, it also requires some regulation. I think especially in this area that is so dynamic and growing so fast, proper regulation is needed. I think a global summit like this, bringing everyone together, is an important platform.

I think as a robotics company, we started by taking dangerous, repetitive, boring jobs away from humans. That itself is already good, because taking labor-intensive tasks that nobody really wants to do but are still very much needed for the industry. In the typical industrial setup, where everything is well-structured and well-organized, you can rely on engineering and precise programming to carry out all the tasks. But when you get a little bit into a semi-structured or unstructured environment, this is where you need techniques like artificial intelligence or machine learning. I can give you an example. Very often, in a logistics setup in e-commerce, you have to pick up different items from a box, from storage, or from a location where you put the stuff. Those environments are not very well defined or structured. This requires that the robot can locate the things and have a way to take the things out of a very unstructured and unsorted way. Another situation, especially when you get out of a manufacturing environment toward caring for older people, because we have an aging society right now, this is also where AI techniques will help a lot together with robotics. Okay.

As we all see, you know, already AI is getting into our daily life and merging together with robotics technology. I think in the short to mid term, one way it will greatly help is in the area of programming. Because one of the biggest obstacles of using robots is that it requires a trained engineer to do all the programming and setup. It's very similar to computers in the old days, they were for professionals. Sooner or later, we need ordinary people when they need to use a robot; you cannot expect them to do computer-scientist type of programming. In this area, AI has shown great possibility and advantage to help any ordinary person to program the robot. In areas like logistics picking and narrow applications like that, AI has already shown great efficiency improvement. So those are the things I think, in the short term and the midterm, will happen.

It's an event I've never seen that has so many people with such diverse sectors. You have people like us coming traditionally from industrial manufacturing environments, but you have companies focusing on social interactions, focusing on government bodies, so focusing on policy issues. I think this is one of the unique platforms to have this conversation with a broader scope of different aspects of society.