Providing Core AI Development Infrastructure to Small and Medium-sized/Venture Companies

To support the activities of domestic artificial intelligence small and medium-sized/venture enterprises, an 'AI Open Innovation Hub' that provides essential infrastructure for artificial intelligence development is being opened.

The Ministry of Science and ICT announced that it aims to boost the artificial intelligence industry through 'AI Hub' support, as the environment for domestic small and medium-sized/venture companies to create various application services using artificial intelligence is currently insufficient.

The 'AI Hub' is an infrastructure that supports an artificial intelligence development environment enabling domestic small and medium-sized/venture companies to freely utilize ① diverse high-quality artificial intelligence training data, ② artificial intelligence open APIs (application program interfaces), and ③ high-performance computing power, which are essential for developing artificial intelligence application services.

① Data sets, which are core to artificial intelligence competitiveness, require significant time and cost for small and medium-sized/venture companies to build. Therefore, the government has prioritized building and opening four types of datasets with high private sector utilization: legal information, patents, Korean Wikipedia, Korean face images, and Korean food images.

Additionally, the government is providing information on approximately 1,000 relevant materials regarding data held by domestic private and public sectors (provision sites, types, specifications, metadata, etc.) to facilitate utilization as artificial intelligence data.

Going forward, plans include expanding to various sectors such as tourism and culture (domestic tourist attractions and major cultural facilities, etc.) and finance (corporate credit data, etc.), as well as continuously opening training data sets from government artificial intelligence software results.

② To enable more convenient and efficient utilization of artificial intelligence technologies supported through government national projects in artificial intelligence product and service development, artificial intelligence software results are provided in the form of open APIs (application program interfaces).

Since November 2017, a total of 14 types of open APIs have been opened, including Korean language analysis (11 types) and speech processing (3 types). In the second half of 2018, plans include additionally releasing a total of 9 types: Korean question answering (1 type) and conversation processing (1 type), foreign language speech recognition (6 types), and image understanding (1 type).

③ For small and medium-sized/venture companies with relatively limited computing environments, GPU-based high-performance cloud computing resources are also provided to enable rapid processing of massive calculations such as deep learning, which is a core technology of artificial intelligence, allowing quick development of products and services.

The 'AI Hub' is built and managed by the Korea Information Society Development Institute (President Seo Byung-jo), and services are provided through a portal (aihub.or.kr).

Yang Hwan-jung, Director of the Information and Communications Policy Bureau at the Ministry of Science and ICT, emphasized that "it is important for small and medium-sized/venture companies, which are the driving force of innovative growth, to develop innovative intelligent products and services that impact society as a whole, thereby creating new markets and industries," and stated that "going forward, we will continue to support the strengthening of competitiveness in the domestic artificial intelligence industry through the creation of an open-type artificial intelligence innovation ecosystem, including expansion of data construction in various fields required by companies."