A leading Chinese academic has called for increased access to non-sensitive scientific data, such as weather information, to support research and development.
Chen Songxi, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Peking University and an academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said scientists face “many difficulties” when trying to obtain public data in China.
Chen said that while Chinese researchers can download real-time public data from the website, they usually cannot access historical data.
“Government office” [in China] Maybe you can take the initiative to share more. [non-sensitive] It’s public data,” he said.
“That sharing is necessary to increase our independence over scientific data, especially in fields such as geosciences and public health, where most research is based on foreign datasets.”
Chen said many Chinese researchers rely on datasets from other places that also have Chinese data, such as the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), an independent intergovernmental organization, and NASA. said.
“If we are denied access to this data, we will not be able to train models at scale,” he said.
A large-scale language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence program that can recognize and generate tasks such as text. They are trained on massive datasets and built on machine learning.
Mr. Chen submitted a proposal to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body, calling for public data to be released and for China to build its own datasets in areas such as the atmosphere, oceans, air quality, and land surface. He said he did. .
One of NDA's key missions is to integrate the vast data resources owned by different organizations in China. Several ministries and more than a dozen local governments have their own data centers or bureaus that are restricted from access by outsiders due to security concerns.
Mr. Chen said that so that public data can be released in an “orderly” manner, assess whether the information is sensitive and concerns the country's core interests, or whether it is non-sensitive, such as weather data. He stated that a system is needed to do so.
Li also said that “basic systems” will be improved to foster innovation and develop “new high-quality production capabilities”, adding that science and technology, from new energy vehicles to biomanufacturing to commercial spaceflight, will be improved. referred to sectors that depend on progress.