They Collaborated Remotely to Create an Intelligent Robot That Understands Medicine and Open Source

At the beginning of this year, 20 open source enthusiasts from different positions, different cities and across multiple age groups came together to create an intelligent question-and-answer robot "Xiaoyuan" to provide users with questions related to the COVID-19 pandemic and open source. Chao Shen Jue is fortunate to invite the team behind Xiaoyuan robot to share Xiaoyuan's story with us.

After fifty or sixty years of development, open source has grown from an initial "spark" to a "raging fire."

According to Gartner survey,**99%'s organization is using open source software in its organizational system.**Especially in emerging technology fields, open source technology is more widely used.

In China, open source has been developed for more than 20 years, and has been in full swing in recent years. More and more Chinese programmers have joined the open source community.Currently, among GitHub's 40 million registered users worldwide, Chinese developers rank second in both quantity and contribution, and the contribution of major technology companies is also increasing.

But despite this, many developers still have some doubts and misunderstandings about open source.

In response to this situation, 20 open source enthusiasts from different professions and ages from all over the country jointly created the open source intelligent question-and-answer robot "Xiaoyuan Robot" to answer people's confusion about open source and unveil the mystery of open source.

Xiaoyuan 1.0: Born out of the COVID-19 pandemic

In fact, Xiaoyuan Robot was not originally built for open source, but was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 is a special year for everyone. At the beginning of the new year, everything was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Faced with the unprecedented COVID-19, everyone was panicking and full of questions about it.

How can we quickly locate the correct epidemic knowledge in the vast amount of information and obtain valuable epidemic information in a timely manner? How can we avoid various rumors and get authoritative answers? These are the problems that need to be solved urgently during the epidemic.

In this context, the Xiaoyuan Robotics team was established. With the close cooperation of everyone, the Xiaoyuan Robotics was quickly formed.

Xiaoyuan Robot is like an expert who knows everything about COVID-19. It can answer questions covering all aspects.Including data encyclopedia, information query, policy disclosure and authoritative announcement, rumor refuting, etc.

As a knowledge-based question-and-answer robot, Xiaoyuan is very user-friendly. You can directly follow the "Open Source Society" WeChat public account through the WeChat public account, or add WeChat "Open Source Society Robot-Xiaoyuan" (WeChat ID: chatbot-yuan) as a friend, and then you can have a conversation with it.

Xiaoyuan 2.0: Transforming to answer questions for open source

As the domestic epidemic situation gradually improves, Xiaoyuan Robot's mission in fighting the epidemic has temporarily come to an end.

Subsequently, Xiaoyuan Robot began to transform and was given a new mission - to resolve everyone's confusion about open source.

After offline research, the team found that there are many misunderstandings and questions about open source. For example, some people may think that you need to understand technology and be able to write code to participate in open source; for another example, as a developer, among the various complex open source protocols, you don’t know how to choose the open source protocol that suits you.

Once an open source project is started, issues such as copyright, patents, and maintenance will arise one after another. Developers may not only be busy typing code, but also have to look for answers to these questions on the vast Internet.

In order to help everyone better understand open source, understand open source, and participate in open source,The Xiaoyuan team decided to use the Xiaoyuan robot to deliver knowledge questions and answers about open source to everyone in the form of a chatbot that is easy to use and relaxed.

The team has included all kinds of questions and answers about open source in the knowledge base of Xiaoyuan Robot. If you have any questions about open source, you can ask the Xiaoyuan Robot and receive accurate answers.

It is reported that Xiaoyuan uses Microsoft's intelligent dialogue platform.**The platform****AI technology gives Xiaoyuan the generalization capabilities of deep learning models, the ability to clarify ambiguous questions, and the ability to conduct multiple rounds of question and answer.**For example, there are dozens of ways to ask the same question. Xiaoyuan relies on its natural language understanding capabilities to accurately understand your intentions and provide accurate answers.

In addition to technology, there are also various non-technical forces that make Xiaoyuan robots more perfect.

These non-technical forces include knowledge base construction, product planning, operation promotion, and intellectual property rights, all of which come from volunteers who are interested in open source and AI robots and lawyers working in the field of intellectual property rights.

In the eyes of team member Zhu Zhongkai, Xiaoyuan robot is not a cold question-answering machine. Each of its answers is answered by team members themselves, including the writing style, tone, and idioms of different authors. For users, they not only gain knowledge through Xiaoyuan robot, but also develop some emotions for Xiaoyuan with its personality.

Xiaoyuan Team: Feel the power and charm of open source

After the launch of the Xiaoyuan robot, it has won praise and love from users, and won the "Mentor's Favorite Project Award" in the Hack for Wuhan hackathon. For the team, the Xiaoyuan robot has brought them more than just these recognitions and honors.

The 20-member team includes high school students, programmers, lawyers, and doctors; they span several age groups, from the 70s to the 00s; they are based all over the country, from Guangzhou to Beijing. They are real "netizens", but they "gather" together and invest in the Xiaoyuan Robot project together.

Although they come from all corners of the world, every member of the Xiaoyuan team is**All have a common vision,**Through Xiaoyuan robots, we use the power of technology to contribute to fighting the epidemic and open source.

At that time, Bai Qingjie of Open Source Society, who was also the initiator of "Epidemic War 2020", organized a team of volunteers to build a knowledge base of epidemic information;

Emily, one of the team members, is a senior product manager of AI at Microsoft Asia Engineering Institute. One of the projects she was responsible for at Microsoft at the time was the intelligent dialogue system, so she was responsible for combining the dialogue system with the epidemic knowledge base (we interviewed Emily last year, for details, please seeHer 10-year journey in open source: Just follow your passion, no matter where you are);

Hui Shiji, product manager of the Xiaoyuan project team, and Zhu Zhongkai, a member of the team, are both new to open source projects. They said,Participating in the Xiaoyuan robot project allowed them to feel the power of open source, feel the strength of open source, and for the first time truly feel the charm of open source.

The problems and challenges encountered during the project also gave them a deeper understanding of building successful chatbots and team collaboration.

In Zhu Zhongkai's words,Open source is essentially an emergent phenomenon in the engineering field in order to combat the increase of entropy.

A person who walks alone can go fast, but a person who walks together can go far. The Xiaoyuan Robotics team is also calling for more developers to join the team.

COSCon'20 ended successfully, Xiaoyuan team invites you to join

**Last weekend, the annual open source event 2020 China Open Source Conference (COSCon'20) was successfully held online.**The guests shared knowledge on the theme of Open Source for Good in a combination of online and offline formats, focusing on 11 areas including artificial intelligence, open source governance, data technology, education and charity.

Hui Shiji, product manager of Xiaoyuan team, in the live broadcast

Shared the development history of Xiaoyuan

On October 24, Hui Shiji, product manager of the Xiaoyuan Robot project team, shared the open source story of Xiaoyuan Robot at the artificial intelligence sub-venue. From product development to the team behind the product, let us get to know Xiaoyuan in all aspects, understand open source, and understand this group of friends who use their actions to show what "open source for good" means.

Xiaoyuan Robot Open Source Address:

https://github.com/kaiyuanshe/xiaoyuan

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