Quality Alchemist (品質煉金術師): HKSQ AGM Quality Innovation Seminar on “Extenics and AI Application”

Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and SEEM Department, CityU organized a Quality Innovation seminar named “Extenics and AI Application” on 4^th Aug 2018. It is our Annual General Meeting (AGM) flagship annual event. American Society for Quality HK (ASQHK), HKQFDA, ISIHK, CityU EngD Society, IISE, ISSC, IEEE-EPS, SSI and IET were supporting organizations. The seminar aimed to share Dr. Aaron Tong’s experience on awarded China Outstanding Quality Professional (中國傑出質量人), Extenics Internationalization activities and AI Application, as well as, Extenics on AI future research directions .

In the beginning, I (Chairman, HKSQ) introduced the aims of Quality Innovation Seminar and thanks for all supporting organizations.

Then Dr. KS Chin (Former Chairman, HKSQ) gave opening speech. He briefed his view on AI form rule-based expert system to data mining and analytics. Recently, CityU has established School of Data Science.

Dr. Aaron Tong (Former Chairman, HKSQ and China Outstanding Quality Professional, CAQ) was the first speaker and his presentation named “Quality Innovation shared by China Outstanding Quality Professional (中國傑出質量人分享品質創新)”. Firstly, Dr. Tong shared this experience and requirements on China Outstanding Quality Professional, CAQ. He said it was not only considered your past achievement but also your recently 3 year’s achievement. The max number of awardee is under ten every year. In 2017, only 8 awardees elected and 6 awardees were CEO of corporation. He added Quality Management System should be Quality of Management System. So that General Manager should be the quality representative.

Dr. Tong reviewed the old concepts of quality assurance which was the plus QA (+ QA). Two major problems of traditional QA were increasing of quality cost and no immediate result observed.

Then he compared the traditional and Modern QA. Traditional method focus on time, service and 3F (Form, Fit and Function). Modern method is Product plus Service, QC needed to consider cost and delivery time. Therefore, Dr. Aaron Tong proposed the minus QA (- QA).

After that he compared the plus QA (+ QA) and the minus QA (- QA) on cost control, theory and main focus.

Lastly, Dr. Aaron Tong shared his success cases to reduce the after-sale return rate from 3% to 0.9. He briefed how to manage the supply chain because it was a cause root (source of failure). He employed Six Sigma concept on “Target Value”.

Dr. Lotto Lai (Chairman, HKSQ; Committee member of Extenics Society, CAAI) was the second speaker and my topic entitled “Extenic Internationalization Promotion, Application and AI Perspective (可拓學的國際化推廣、應用及在人工智能中的期待)”. In the beginning, I shared many promotion activities of Extenics in 2017-18 including conferences, articles and seminars.

One of milestone was the first World Summit for Chinese Quality which organized by World Alliance of Chinese Quality (CAQ, CSQ, HKSQ and SQI). We used this platform to introduce “Extenics” for Chinese in different areas.

Then I shared my recently research that integrated Six Sigma DMAIC with Extenics METS to be a new model named Extenics Six Sigma (ExSS) model in order to fill the Six Sigma gap between Analyze Phase and Improve Phase.

After that I shared AI related police named “A Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan” in China and how Extenics+AI could contribute on this development.

I also briefed the Deep Learning mechanism.

Lastly Saturday and Sunday, I attended the Chinese Congress on Artificial Intelligence in Shenzhen and shared some most new AI application and theories as follows:

i) The Future of AI is at Hand and Thinking about Xiaobing (小冰) product implementation

ii) Federated Transfer Learning (聯邦遷移學習)

iii) AI and QA/QC

iv) Supervised Learning in which Generalization Capability (泛化能力) is the core concept.

v) Phrase Mining from Massive Text and Its Applications

vi) Advancement of Large-Scale Image Understanding and Segmentation

vii) A Preliminary Exploration to Deep Forest (深度森林)

viii) Brain Science and Brain-like Machine Learning

ix) Concept Drift (Dynamic Model)

At the end, I added two more circle under AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. They were Machine Thinking and Deep Thinking. I expected Deep Thinking was human creativity and it appeared during contradiction problems to be solved. That is “Extenics”!

Prof. Yang Chunyan (楊春燕) (Director, Institute of Extenics and Innovation Methods, Guangdong University of Technology) was the last speaker and her topic named “Extenics plus AI Research Progress and Future Development (可拓學+AI的研究概況及未來發展)”. Prof. Yang said intelligence included Human Intelligence (HI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Extenics could enhance HI to solve contradiction problems.

Extenics is an original China New Science which studies the possibility of extending things and rules and methodology of developing innovation with formalized patterns for resolving contradictory problem.

In order to enhance HI, Extenics plus Innovation Education was one of directions. And then using Extenics plus AI to enhance Machine Intelligence to assist human solving contradiction problems. Then Prof. Yang introduced Extenics + AI research progress as follows.

Main research directions included:

i) Extension Strategy Generating System (ESGS) (可拓策略生成系統)

ii) Extension Data Mining System (EDMS) (可拓數據挖掘系統)

iii) Extension Design System (EDS) (可拓設計系統)

Prof. Yang briefed the application of ESGS on “HowNet” knowledge base and Gene Expression Programming (GEP) (基因表达式编程)

And then she stated the structure of Extension Strategy Generating System to us.

After that Prof. Yang introduced the Extension Data Mining System (EDMS) which was based on Extension Set theory to identify quantitative and qualitative change using some formulas.

Finally, Prof. Yang described the Extension Design System (EDS) which based on 3 creation methods and Extension Innovation Method as well as Basic Element Base.

Lastly, Prof. Yang concluded the future development of Extenics + AI as follows:

i) Enhancing Basic Element Base, Extension Rule Base, Extension Knowledge Graph, Extension Data Mining’s Database and Domain Database

ii) Developing Extension Intelligence Platform and System

iii) Developing Extension Quality Innovation Strategy Generating System

At the end, Prof. Yang said Extenics plus AI equal to Extension Intelligence (可拓學+AI=可拓智能) that was an important research direction. So as to solving contradictions for quality innovation and improved existing quality innovation methodologies.

Then I represented HKSQ to present souvenir to Prof. Yan Chunyan.

I also presented souvenir to Dr. Aaron Tong.

And presented to Dr. KS Chin for SEEM CityU support this seminar.

Before HKSQ AGM, all speakers and organizers took group photo.

During AGM, I presented the Chairman report to HKSQ members.

The coming HKSQ Exco members were:

Office Bearers

Chairman : Dr. Lotto Lai (Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corp.)

Vice Chairman : Ms. Angela Wong (UL VS Hong Kong Ltd.)

Hon Secretary : Ms. Sunny Meng (Vitasoy International Holdings Limited)

Hon Treasurer : Mr. Ricky Suen (Former Regular Committee Member)

Regular Committee Members

Ms. Minda Chiang (HealthBaby Biotech (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd.)

Dr. K.S. Chin (City University of Hong Kong)

Mr. Peter Fung (HyperIn Asia Ltd.)

Mr. Theo Wong (The Hong Kong & China Gas Company Limited)

Dr. Fugee Tsung (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Dr. Aaron Tong (TQM Consultants Co., Ltd.)

Dr. Albert Tsang (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Mr. Ben Tsang (SGS Hong Kong Ltd.)

Ms. Natalie Law (WTT HK Limited)

Ms. Jane Wong (General Inspection Services Hong Kong Co., Ltd.)

End the end of AGM, we appreciated our Former Chairman Mr. CP Chow long-term contribution to HKSQ and presented a trophy to him. Since CP was not available to attend the meeting, Dr. Albert Tsang represented him to take a trophy.