HKPC AI & 5G Workshop: Alibaba Damo Academy and Huawei (阿里巴巴達摩院及華為工作坊)

The AI & 5G Workshop to visit to Alibaba Damo Academy and Huawei was jointly organized by Hong Kong Productivity Council (HKPC) and HKAI Lab  on 30 Sep 2019. Artificial intelligence and 5G technology complement each other. Leading companies and 5G network providers in the field of artificial intelligence in the world have been clamoring for the 5G network generation. This visit ot Alibaba Dharma Institute and the Huawei Workshop aimed to enable the industry to master the solutions and trends of artificial intelligence and 5G integration development.  I took a photo with Taobao sculpture in front of the entry of Ali Center.

Ali Center brank in the bridge

Different floor had different companies in the center. We went to the 9/F.  

In the beginning, Mr. Jeffrey Sit (General Manager, Smart Manufacturing and Mainland Business, HKPC) gave introductory speech on this workshop and visit.

Then Mr. Timothy Leung (Executive Director, HKAI Lab) gave a speech and he had been Ali-man before.  

Firstly, Dr. Zhang Lei (張磊) (达摩院城市大脑实验室高级研究员) introduced the AI Centre of Alibaba DAMO Academy. It is dedicated to exploring the unknown through scientific and technological research and innovation and founded on 11 Oct 2017.  He said his nickname in DAMO Academy was “Three Stone” (三石) and every staff had their nick name based on Martial Art Novel in the beginning.  However, almost all names had been used and then relaxed to other special nickname.

Then Dr. Zhang introduced the position of DAMO Academy that research for solving the problem with profit and fun.  Their visions are to live longer than Alibaba and service to the whole world at least upto 2 billion people, as well as, using technology to solve future problem.

And then Dr. Zhang demonstrated some applications in visual intelligent computing in DAMO Academy included video image process, medical image process, industrial inspection and City Brain.  One of examples is to change Jack Ma video frame automatically

After that Dr. Zhang briefed the AI technology and application in City Brain. It could be traced the car and counting crowd of people.  Moreover, it could construct real time 3 dimension image.

Another representative introduced Alibaba industrial solution.  It included Intelligentization of Product, Production, Service and Operation.

Then he introduced the solution framework from cloud computing basic platform, application platform and business platform.  

After that he showed a video for Digitization of Tao Factory related to digitization solution of IoT Alibaba Cloud.  Some problems in visual intelligent scenario included data accumulation, data labelling, etc. 

Finally, he briefed the open visual training platform enable customer through data, labelling, training, testing and strategy.

The third representative Ms. Wei Xihan (魏溪含) introduced industrial scenario and solution.

She briefed different inspection cases such as solar panel, tire, cloth, PCB, etc. 

The last representative introduced the general identification in industrial case study.  Those cases included figure identification, crowd counting, face recognition, behavior recognition, etc. 

Based on big data and deep learning algorithm, business defined to employ those technology for visual recognition. 

Finally, Ali-cloud service framework was briefed that included core algorithm, service platform, customer connect and industry support.

Lunch in hotel

We arrived the Huawei Shenzhen Base.  We met Mr. Zhang Yihui, (New ICT Marketing Expert, Enterprise Business Marketing Dept., Huawei) (The first one in right hand side)

Very beautiful hall

I took a photo in front of Huawei University motto.  

Firstly, Ms. Huang Yuhong (黃玖紅) briefed the background and the title named “Bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world”. 

Firstly, she introduced Huawei is leading global provider of ICT infrastructure and smart devices that serviced more than 170 countries with 188k staff in which 80k R&D Engineers.  They had 36 Joint Innovation Centers in the world.

Then she mentioned their investment in innovation upto ~15% of total sales revenue.  

And then she stated Huawei and Partners to support digital transformation in major industries included government, finance, energy, manufacturing, transportation, education, etc.

After that we visited the exhibition center and the floor plan was showed in the diagram.  However, photo taking in there was not allowed same as I visited the previous exhibition center in 2010 (see reference).

Mr. Zhang Yihui (章异辉) (New ICT Marketing Expert, Enterprise Business Marketing Dept., Huawei) gave a talk to us and the presentation entitled “Seize the 5G opportunity to accelerate industry intelligence (搶佔5G先機, 加速行業智能)”. 

In the beginning, Mr. Zhang briefed the Huawei 5G strategy in more than 170 countries.  Then he mentioned three power of 5G and they were high speed, low latency and big connection. 

Then he compared 4G and 5G in speed, latency and connectivity network capability.

Different countries and regions had different band wide for 5G.  The frequency usually employed 3.5GHz (C-Band).  Only USA used mmWave.  

And then Mr. Zhang briefed two structures that are Non-Standalone (NSA) and Standalone (SA).  NSA employed existing 4G stations and adding some 5G stations.  SA employed whole new 5G stations.  Huawei supported both structures.

Finally, Mr. Zhang introduced TOP horizontal solution and vertifical industry under business value related to 5G.  

The second speaker was Ms. Huang Yuhong (黃玖紅) and their topic entitled “Advance Intelligence”.  She said AI was the core engine of the fourth industrial revolution.

Then she briefed the relationship between industry and digitalization level in different stages. 

After that she introduced different AI strategies in the world.  

She also introduced Huawei AI strategy in 10 items from “AS-IS” to “TO-BE”. 

Finally, she mentioned the “MindSpore” whole scenario AI calculation framework and it could become open source in 2020 Q1. 

Lastly, Ms. Huang concluded Huawei advantage in the whole scenario AI solution in chip, platform, framework and product.

The last speaker of Huawei representative introduced Huawei Cloud and how it assist enterprise for digitalization.  That included IoT (All Sensing), 5G (All Connected), Cloud (All Digitalized) and AI (All Intelligent).  He said Cloud was runway and AI, IoT and 5G were engine.  

Firstly, he said the barriers of AI industry development were expensive on computing power and difficult on algorithm development. 

Then they developed Da Vinci structure for AI and formed Atlas AI computing platform.  

One of examples employed Huawei Cloud was the famous Chinese film named “The Wandering Earth (流浪地球)”.

Lastly, he concluded their collaboration ecosystem based on Huawei Cloud.  They expected terminal and cloud collaboration to establish AI ecosystem. 

At the end, HKPC representatives presented souvenir to Huawei director and took a group photo with all speakers.

Reference:

HKPC AI & Robotics - https://www.hkpc.org/en/industry-support-services/a-i-robotics

Alibaba Damo Academy - https://damo.alibaba.com/

Huawei University - https://baike.baidu.com/item/华为大学

20190617: HKPC AI Impulse 2019 Summit - Day 1 - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2019/06/hkpc-ai-impulse-2019-summit-day-1.html

20190618: HKPC AI Impulse 2019 Summit - Day 2 - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2019/06/hkpc-ai-impulse-2019-summit-day-2.html

Previous visit:

20101308: Visit to Huawei, IGRS and Tsinghua University in Shenzhen (華為, 閃聯, 清華一天考察團) - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2010/12/visit-to-huawei-igrs-and-tsinghua.html

20141213: HKSQ Technical Visit to Alibaba Hong Kong - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2014/12/hksq-technical-visit-to-alibaba-hong.html