FUZHOU, April 30 (Xinhua) -- Humanoid robots are welcoming crowds of visitors at the on-site experience area, which covers 56,000 square meters at the 9th Digital China Summit, a two-day event held on Wednesday and Thursday in the city of Fuzhou in east China's Fujian Province.

From cultural creativity to public safety, humanoid robots demonstrated diverse real-world applications. Calligraphy robots write the Chinese character "Fu" carefully, while tea-making robots warm cups and brew tea, attracting audiences to queue up for a taste. Go game robots make spectators hold their breath in full concentration.

In tenser scenarios, intelligent tunnel fire rescue and inspection robots can penetrate fire scenes to monitor fire conditions, serving as the best partners of firefighters. Quadruped robots and even manned robotic dogs make appearances, showcasing advanced mobility and autonomous obstacle avoidance without manual control.

Nearly 400 enterprises, including China Southern Power Grid, Alibaba Group, and ZTE Corporation, released over 6,000 cutting-edge technologies and products for digital transformation, covering chips, industrial large models, embodied intelligence and other fields, with 65 percent of the exhibits on public display for the first time, according to Liu Liehong, head of the National Data Administration.

About 100 typical cases of data integration in agriculture, manufacturing, healthcare and cultural tourism were also displayed, he added.

Foreign companies also come to showcase their latest technological products and explore business opportunities. For example, Tesla presents itself as an artificial intelligence (AI) enterprise, with its humanoid robot on display at the summit.

This year marks the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030) and the second decade of the Digital China initiative. The new plan dedicates a special chapter to advancing digital and intelligent development, emphasizing the efficient supply of computing power, algorithms and data to empower economic and social progress.

It also calls for the full rollout of the "AI Plus" initiative to upgrade industries and boost productivity.

Behind the smart applications, high-quality data has become critical for advancing AI, according to Wang Xingxing, founder and CEO of Unitree Robotics.

"Existing AI can already solve problems well in sectors with sufficiently high-quality data," Wang said at the summit. Yet he noted a major bottleneck: data scarcity in humanoid and embodied intelligence, which requires massive amounts of motion and task data for factory and real-world operations.

Unitree has recently open-sourced a full-body motion dataset, covering data collection and application in household, medical and simple industrial scenarios. "We hope to advance the large-scale motion data collection for full-body robots this year and in the next few years," said Wang.

Wang is eagerly anticipating that embodied intelligence would reach its "ChatGPT moment" -- when robots can complete 80 percent of tasks in 80 percent of unfamiliar environments via voice or text commands -- within two to three years.

Data-powered AI is also transforming daily life and public services by improving efficiency and quantifying intangible services.

In education, AI has drastically shortened courseware development time from one week to one hour, enriching teaching resources while cutting costs from thousands of yuan to hundreds of yuan, said Chen Changjie, vice president of NetDragon Websoft.

In healthcare, Bamai Technology showcased a digital Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) health system that integrates TCM principles with modern sensing technology.

Fan Chong, one of Bamai Technology's partners, stated that the system digitally inherits the expertise of senior TCM practitioners.

"It usually takes a long time for young TCM practitioners to become proficient, requiring at least five to six years of mentoring from senior doctors," Fan mentioned the necessity of quantifying TCM diagnosis. "Meanwhile, TCM diagnosis is highly subjective with inconsistent evaluation criteria among different practitioners."

By learning from veteran doctors across 12 hospitals in east China's Zhejiang Province, the model has achieved an accuracy rate of 83.45 percent and has been adopted by more than 6,000 health service businesses and insurance companies. By digitizing the experience of senior TCM practitioners, the model supports the standardization and internationalization of TCM, Fan said.

During the upcoming Labor Day holiday, the summit's on-site experience area remains open to the public. Visitors may enjoy immersive, interactive experiences across over 100 projects and embrace the charm of technological advancement. ■