The Zhongguancun Forum, which kicked off in Beijing on Thursday, has pooled insightful punditry for multi-pronged frontline sci-tech innovation, echoing its theme of "Innovating for a Better World".
The forum is designated to be a platform for pooling wisdom and sparking ideas with fortified alignment and esteemed guests and speakers, including government officials, industry leaders and renowned academics, shared their insightful visions about the future of technology and entrepreneurship at the opening ceremony.
Many attendees believe that the rapid development and application of artificial intelligence technology are further accelerating technological innovation across various fields.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, China's annual research and development expenditure exceeded 3.3 trillion yuan (about 515.625 billion U.S. dollars) in 2023, marking a year-on-year growth of 8.1 percent.
"Over the past century, the methods, inventions, and research achievements of structural biology have propelled our understanding of life to unprecedented heights. Nowadays, leveraging AI to empower and utilizing vast structural databases for drug design is no longer empty talk," said Yan Ning, an academician from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
"New technology opens new possibilities for different kinds of science. It's really not many countries that contribute to innovation these days. The Chinese people are more likely to embrace technology and just figure out how to use it," said Piero Scaruffi, founder of Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SVAIRI).
Spanning five days from Thursday to Monday, this year's forum will host nearly 120 activities.
The forum will focus on artificial intelligence, life sciences, new materials, carbon peak, carbon neutrality, medical health, clean energy and other fields, and build a trading and sharing platform for more than 3,000 scientific and technological achievements from more than 40 countries and regions.