Experiments with artificial intelligence, cloud computing and 5G aim to make urban living more convenient
As China undertakes the largest urban planning initiative in world history, local governments and high-tech companies are experimenting with ways to use the rapidly emerging technologies of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, the internet-of-things and 5G to make city dwellers’ lives more convenient.
Current programs in China are aimed at improving traffic flow, reducing the time businesses and citizens spend getting government permits and documents, and facilitating access to healthcare.
A 2015 report by Deloitte found that China has about 500 smart city pilot projects, far more than any other country in the world.
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The booth of Huawei at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb 26. Guo Qiuda / Xinhua |
In November 2017, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology designated four companies – Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and iFlytek – as a “national team” for pushing the development of AI, with Baidu, specializing in driverless car technology, Alibaba in computer vision, Tencent in healthcare and Iflytek in speech recognition. Each of these companies, plus Huawei and Pingan insurance and scores of smaller companies are all developing technologies, platforms and business strategies related to smart cities.
Analysts estimate that the cumulative investment in smart city technology development and deployment is likely to break 2 trillion yuan ($290 billion; 256 billion euros; ￡230 billion) by 2025, fueled by massive urbanization projects.
“The Chinese government puts great emphasis on developing new technologies. You can see it from the huge investment it has made in AI and smart city development. Almost every city’s mayor is talking about smart cities, AI, big data and cloud computing,” Li Yangming, a Chinese IT expert and a visiting fellow at Stanford University, said at a seminar hosted by Stanford US-Asia Technology Management Center in November, as reported in China Daily.
For example, the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, is working closely with Alibaba to use the city’s network of cameras and other sensors to optimize traffic light timing to improve traffic flow. So far, regular traffic speeds are up 15 percent.
“For special vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks, we do optimization for them automatically. It cuts their travel time by 50 percent,” says Hua Xiansheng, head of the City Brain lab at Alibaba. City Brain is Alibaba’s brand name for this technology platform.
According to Hua, who is an expert in machine vision, City Brain is the only artificial intelligence system in the world that can achieve real-time analysis of citywide videos. He says that this is made possible by Alibaba’s existing capabilities in cloud computing and by its investment in AI that emphasizes computer vision.
“AI technology mainly has two types – cognition technologies like vision technology to recognize what is happening on the road, and big data, which allows cognition, optimization, searching and prediction.
“Video data is the majority of the data in the city, which will have the richest value, but it is also the most difficult part of the data because it is just pixels to the computer. We have to analyze this data before using it. Plus, there is other data like GPS data, data from car-counting coils in the ground and microwave data,” he says.
“Before we had cloud computing technology and AI technology, it was hard to process the huge amount of data to find the value in that data. Today we have cloud computing, and much more computing power, and AI technology has made big progress in deep learning. It gives us a tool to analyze that data. The core idea of City Brain is to use artificial intelligence technologies and big data technologies to mine the data that is accumulating every day in the city.”
Making access to healthcare faster and easier is another key emphasis of smart cities. For example, Haidian district of northwest Beijing has built a network of medical information in which healthcare professionals can access medical records and patients can view their records, pay their bills and get medical advice. Similarly, the city of Shanghai has made significant strides in implementing smart health technology. A network of medical information allows patients to access records and easily move between providers.
Li Jintao, dean of the Haidian district health department, says that the district is implementing smart city technology to provide the residents with better and more efficient diagnosis and treatment services. “The Intelligent Health Project was launched to strengthen and promote data sharing among three aspects of the health system: community health centers, hospital information systems, and hospital administration systems. Now, a health network covering community hospitals and clinics at the primary care level has been established. More than 120 hospitals and clinics centralized information and unified their information systems,” Li says.
“This smart health system allows residents to see the doctor more conveniently. The doctors can diagnose more quickly and accurately. And, the management of regional healthcare is more standardized and scientific,” he adds.
“In many community hospitals, the distribution of medicines is easier because we can scan a barcode to get the registration information automatically. Plus, since community hospitals are connected to regional central hospitals, they can access patient records in different locations. The patient can receive medical advice from specialists of the regional hospital while at their local community hospital. Also, patients can register to view their medical records via the internet and, in many institutions, pay for their consultations by mobile phone,” he explained.
According to Cai Xiujun, president of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital of the School of Medicine at Zhejiang University, patients will soon be able to take care of preliminary processes using their mobile phones, reducing the average time they spend waiting in the hospital.
Without this type of system, patients might have to arrive at the hospital early in the morning to try to make an appointment and might have to make multiple trips and wait in line to deal with paperwork.
Smart city technologies can also be used to streamline business permits and citizens’ interactions with the government, according to Zheng Zhibin, general manager of Huawei’s Global Smart City Business department.
“The integration of urban data and the re-engineering of cross-departmental processes can change the previous heavy demands on people and businesses, greatly enhancing the efficiency of administrative approvals and enhancing the happiness of the public,” he says.
“The key points of the construction of an intelligent city are interconnecting all things, data fusion and business cooperation. We seek to integrate and optimize the existing resources, improve the efficiency of urban management and service, enhance the well-being of the citizens, ensure the sustainable development of the city and create a good working, living and leisure environment for enterprises and the public.”
Zheng added that Huawei’s business strategy is based on its 5G expertise.
“On June 14, 2018, 3GPP 5G, the first 5G stand-alone networking standard, completed the first phase of full functional standardization, marking the beginning of the commercial phase of 5G.” he says. “5G will have a bandwidth of 10Gb per second, a time delay of less than 1 millisecond and can address 1 million connections per square kilometer. We can imagine that 5G technology will be widely used in such fields as unmanned, intelligent manufacturing, intelligent energy, robotics, ultrahigh-definition home entertainment, networked drones, live broadcast social networks, smart cities and so on. This will change our lives greatly.”
Iflytek is the member of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s national team that emphasizes speech recognition. Tong Jianjun, vice-president and chief engineer of Iflytek’s Smart City Business, says: “The business strategy of iFlytek’s Intelligent City division is divided into two directions. First, we need to keep exploring and developing world-class AI and big data core technologies so that China will have the latest technology in our own hands.
“Second, we combine leading AI and big data core technology results with industry applications for smart cities. Our goals are to continuously improve the intelligence level of the industry system, make urban layout planning more balanced and reasonable, monitor current conditions in a more timely and accurate way, make emergency response more rapid and accurate and improve carbon efficiency.”
Tong adds: “Smart medicine is an important business direction of iFlytek and is an integral part of the whole smart city construction. We use our leading artificial intelligence technology to achieve accurate and rapid diagnosis, with the aim of fundamentally solving the shortage of high-quality medical resources in China.”
Chinese smart city research and implementation, however, is not limited just to China.
In April, Cambridge University in the United Kingdom and the municipal government of Nanjing, Jiangsu province, announced they would create a joint smart cities research center, to be located in Nanjing. And, in 2016, the “Future Cities Catapult”, one of the UK’s leading platforms for urban innovation, signed a memorandum of understanding with the China Center for Urban Development, the country’s leading agency for urban development.
Alibaba is working with Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to ease traffic congestion. Also, according to CGTN, Malaysia’s largest television network, Malaysian businesses and government agencies will be able to benefit from the City Brain platform. Kuala Lumpur’s 500 traffic cameras will livestream to Alibaba’s cloud. Ride-hailing app Grab and real-time navigation system Waze will also feed data to the system.
According to CGTN, Yasmin Mahmood, CEO of Malaysia Digital Economy, says: “Malaysia is very much committed to the Belt and Road Initiative, so it’s natural for us to have that level of collaboration manifesting itself in something that both countries find very important, which is an AI-driven solution, and how AI can impact society and the economy of a country.”
The US-based business consulting company PwC recently projected that artificial intelligence will add $15.7 trillion to the global GDP by 2030, with China earning $7 trillion of that total, compared with North America’s $3.7 trillion in gains. According to The Verge, an online tech-focused magazine, China accounted for 48 percent of the world’s AI startup funding, compared with 38 percent in the United States.
Asked whether China is leading the world in smart city technology, Hua Xiansheng of Alibaba’s City Brain says: “I believe so, especially the implementation part. Many people are asking why China has made big progress not only in smart cities but also in the wider implementation part of AI technology. Many think it is all about the abundance of data, but I look at it differently.”
“The major reason is that the people of China – including governments, including industry people – really want to try new technologies to make changes to their businesses or their management. So, according to my experience, this is the major thing that makes us at least look like we’re moving faster than other parts of the world. People really want to try new things to use this technology to solve existing problems or to use new technology to see what it can do that we could not do before,” Hua says.
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People are attracted by a driverless shuttle bus in China’s first artificial intelligence theme park in Beijing. Photos Provided to China Daily |
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A boy interacts with a robot guide in a hospital in Tianjin. |
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A robot waiter serves in a restaurant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. |
(China Daily European Weekly 12/21/2018 page1)