Zubair Qureshi
Shanghai
Conventionally it is believed President of the United States Donald Trump is among very few and ahead of world leaders in using social media to talk about his foreign policies but in fact there are leaders (presidents or prime ministers) of 135 countries who are currently using social media and upload their posts on Twitter regularly.
Prof Dr Ting Wang of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) on Saturday revealed this while interacting with Belt & Road mainstream media persons who are currently in the city in the last leg of 21-day tour of Global Training Programme. The title of his lecture was “Artificial Intelligence & Social Media.”
According to Prof Ting’s research France’s President Macron is ahead of the US president in use of twitter. Among top 10 countries whose leaders are active on Twitter account, France is on the top, the US is second while India, Canada, UK, Senegal and Rwanda are respectively third, fourth, fifth, sixth. In the last three names on the list, Israel is 8th, Belgium 9th and Nigeria 10th.
Prof Ting said from 2012 to 2016 in Artificial Intelligence or AI, China’s investment with US $2.6 billion was the second largest after the US (US$17.9 billion). The United Kingdom invested US$800 in AI during the same period, Canada $ 640 million, Germany $ 639m, Israel $400m, Japan $300m, France $280m, Spain $250m and Switzerland spent US$210 million in AI.
Similarly, number of AI companies in China (709) are second to those of US i.e. 2,905, while the UK, India, Canada Israel are far behind China in this respect.
China he said was paying considerable attention to AI as it is the future and will soon take place of the mainstream media in all respects. At present the number of STEM students in China is higher than any other country of the world ie. 4.7 million, India he said was second in this regard with 2.6 million students. The US, Russia and Iran are third, fourth and fifth such countries where high number of STEM students are registered.
According to Dr Ting took a huge leap after 2014 and now the country is the largest market of the world in AI products. Similarly, China is among very few countries that have AI strategies rather it announced its 3-year Action Plan in AI strategies in December 2017.
Earlier, Prof Dr Yining Yan of SISU’s School of Journalism & Communication gave a detailed presentation of “Media Development in China.” Media in China, she said could be categorized as national media, provincial media, local media and county/city media.
Currently, she said there were 360 TV stations with 2058 TV channels are operating in far and wide of China. There were 47 Satellite TV channels, 360 radio stations, 2,000 newspaper, 10,130 periodicals, 0.8 billion Internet users and 0.760 billion mobile phone users with almost 98pc mobile phone penetration.
Among these channels and stations, she said fierce competition was underway to get maximum business. According to her research 33pc of mobile phone users over the age of 60 were spending 80pc of their mobile data on wechat.