Rome, November 7 and 8. ‘La Nuvola’ Convention Center, ‘La Nube’, in Spanish. A spectacular metallic structure, which resembles a large cloud, covers much of the roof of the pavilion’s airspace. We are in the Huawei Ecco Connect Europe 2018. A lot of information, news, announcements, partners, news that will arrive in 2019 like Huawei Pay, but for me a detail and a talk above all the others. A meeting for journalists and analysts with Alex Wang, CEO of the X Labs of the Chinese firm.
And in this meeting, Wang affirms that “in a few years the smartphone will have nothing to do with the current ones. Today they are all the same, in hardware, with little differences between one and the other. Screens, their sizes, buttons to raise or lower the volume, sensors for the cameras, for biometric authentications are in very similar places,…. In a few years all the intelligence of the devices will be in the Cloud and in the Network, and thanks to 5G technology we will be able to offer very different devices in terms of the form factor, and applications that nobody imagines today. ”.
The real world and the digital world, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), 5G connectivity, and storage and processing capacity in the Cloud, will be increasingly united. “AI will be everywhere, but it will run in the Cloud. In the future 99% of the Internet will be used by things, by cars, by robots, by drones, by airplanes. And this is why we need to totally rethink and re-optimize the entire Network, ”says Wang.
This is why one of the eco-Connect’s star announcements was the launch of HiAI 2.0, an open platform designed to facilitate the development of artificial intelligence on the device, and which provides developers with an ecosystem that allows them take advantage of the capabilities of Huawei’s chipsets, equipment and Cloud through the HiAI Foundation, the HiAI engine and the HiAI service.
The HiAI platform takes advantage of the capabilities of the company’s latest processor, Kirin 980, and its dual NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to perform a much higher image recognition speed compared to its predecessor, or up to 4,500 images per minute. It also supports a greater number of operation models for developers, creating an environment whereby artificial intelligence applications can run more smoothly and offer a better user experience.
To date, Huawei has more than 1,000 partners and 450,000 developers actively working within the HiAI ecosystem, empowering more than 300 million users with AI capabilities. Under the HiAI program, the Chinese company operates 13 R&D centers and 2 open laboratories around the world to collaborate with local developers in application development. These labs also play the role of a springboard for developers to launch their projects globally and build the artificial intelligence ecosystem.
This is how clear the president of Huawei, Liang Hua, at the opening of the event: “AI is called to become the leading technology of the future, just as electricity was during the industrial revolution. There are enormous opportunities in this field and we have been involved in its development and implementation from the beginning. We are committed to the grassroots research and application of artificial intelligence. And we are pioneers in the launch of AI chips that provide complete solutions at all levels ”.
Alex Wang, in addition to instructing us and envisioning how the devices of the future can change, taught in Rome some of the services that can be enjoyed thanks to the convergence of artificial intelligence, 5G, the Cloud and the Internet of Things. Such as Wireless ehealth, remote driving, factories connected with private 5G networks, or the Digital Sky initiative, a project to provide coverage and mobile broadband capabilities from the airspace through drones, with the aim of developing new applications in the field of agriculture, infrastructure, security, logistics, air taxis, …
