China to increase investment in artificial intelligence

China will step up efforts to promote the development of artificial intelligence technology as electronic gadgets are becoming increasingly smart and the sector is in need of new growth engines, a senior official from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said.

"More efforts are needed to boost the research and development of biometric recognition, human-machine interaction and other cutting-edge technologies which can push the growth of electronic information industry up," said, Liu Lihua, vice-minister of industry and information technology.

He made the comments at the 2017 China Information Technology Expo, which is under way from Sunday to Tuesday in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, the country's manufacturing powerhouse.

In 2016, China's electronic manufacturing industry posted revenue of 12.2 trillion yuan ($1.77 trillion), up 9.3 percent from a year earlier. China is the largest producer of smartphones, networking equipment and TVs in the world.

Among all the products, the panel display sector has been making significant progress, shifting from overreliance on imported products in the past to accounting for 27 percent of the total shipment area in the world in 2016.

China's panel display industry posted sales revenue of more than 201 billion yuan last year, up 20 percent year-on-year, official data show.

But Ouyang Zhongcan, an academician at Chinese Academy of Sciences, warned of possible over-investment in small-area displays and called for more efforts on R&D of high-end products.