China And Israel Tech Ties Grow Closer With $10M Deal For 3 AI Centers

China and Israel tech collaboration just grew a little closer again with the signing of an initial $10 million investment by a Chinese conglomerate and an institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the University of Haifa to create three artificial intelligence centers in Beijing, Hangzhou and Haifa. The centers, which will house R&D facilities that will work toward commercialization of artificial intelligence, are financed by Chinese billionaire Zhou Qinghou, chairman of the privately owned Hangzhou Wahaha Group. The deal is a distance from the company's main business in beverages. The agreement takes a page out of the ground-breaking deal by Technion University and Cornell to develop joint campuses in China and New York City to help develop technological breakthroughs in a sort of New Tech Triangle. Under this new Israel-China deal, the institutes will select cutting-edge application technologies from University of Haifa and the Chinese Academy of Sciences' advance disciplines that can be industrialized, including vision tracking through mobile devices, image processing and big data for medical application, 3D image learning, chip technologies and biometric identification.