AI-Empowered Cities Create a Connected World

Welcome to the Keynote series for New Horizons, the podcast channel for Huawei’s ICT Insights Magazine. Please join us as we listen to tech industry experts and thought leaders. Today we’re at Huawei’s Smart City Summit 2018 with Ma Yue, Vice President for the Enterprise Business Group. Mr. Yue is explaining how Huawei is deploying a full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio to improve Smart City governance. Let’s hear what Ma Yue has to say.

Distinguished guests, friends, ladies, and gentlemen: Welcome to Huawei’s Smart City Summit 2018.

Cities play a very important role in the economic and social activities. From the ‘Garden City’ in the Middle Ages to the modern industrial cities, and to the low carbon and the resilient cities — cities have evolved with the human civilizations. The 21st century marks a new era, as digital technologies are pervasive in city governance, public security, industries, and people’s lives. Cities around the world are competing with each other to develop Smart Cities, which underpin the digital economy. Smart Cities have come through several phases:

Phase 1: Breaking information silos

Phase 2: Developing mobile Internet applications, and

Phase 3: Acquiring massive data through the IoT

And most recently, we call Phase 4: Improving the city governance with artificial intelligence-based data and analysis.

This October, Huawei unveiled our AI strategy and full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolios. The ‘full stack’ means that Huawei offers the entire stack of chip enablement, a training and inference framework, and application enablement. ‘All scenario’ means that AI can be deployed in public clouds, private clouds, on the edge, the industrial IoT devices, and consumer devices. As a leading provider of ICT infrastructure, Huawei is able to build the scenario among the cloud, IoT, big data, video, edge computing, and AI. Just like the human being, how the brain, the central nervous (system), and the nerve endings work together, work with each other, the network elements from the command centers to the sensors can be fully connected. In this way, an open-(source)-plus-AI digital platform is built to enable the digital transformation. Such digital platforms will become a city’s operating system, what we call the OS.

The OS connects each other with different kinds of sensors, which help to create a ‘digital twin’ for the city. At the same time, the OS enables the developers to build diverse applications. In this regard, our digital platform is highly efficient and open to the ecosystem partners. The platform shows that our capability to meet all the needs of Smart City in a high-level design, integration, operations, and services to the partners and customers. The Smart City is a complex system network. It might have a beginning but not an end. At present, there are no unified standards for the Smart City worldwide. Huawei hopes that we can formulate these standards together with our customers and partners. So far, Huawei has participated in more than 160 Smart City projects over 40 countries.

Moving forward, Huawei’s AI-enabled digital platform will be the smart cornerstone for (many) more cities to achieve the sustainable development.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to conclude my speech with Huawei’s vision and mission: To bring digital to every person, home, and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world.

Let’s join hands together to make our Smart City better and better, smarter and smarter.

Thank you very much.

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Biography:

Ma Yue, Vice President, Huawei Enterprise Business Group (EBG); President, Huawei EBG Global Sales Department; and President, Huawei EBG Alliances & Partners Department.