What will AI bring to Bay Area?

A recent press conference heralded the AI & All Guangzhou International Summit 2019 to be held on Oct 23 in Guangzhou’s Nansha district. It will be the third artificial intelligence meeting Nansha has hosted in the past consecutive three years.

The summit is themed "AI remains everywhere", having "high end", "quality", "internalization" and "marketization" as its keywords. It will gather 600 experts from home and abroad to brainstorm and share their achievements.

The district, enjoying many preferential policies in technology innovation, is home to over 170 AI enterprises. Moreover, it is an important node of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Science and Technology Corridor and connects with 11 cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Yang Jun, deputy director of the Guangdong Science and Technology Department, indicated that the core business of AI industry of the whole province will reach 50 billion yuan ($7.03 billion) in output value and drive related industries to accomplish 300 billion yuan in value.

The summit will contain a theme conference, five parallel forums and three specialized sub-forums. The experts will discuss basic theory, technology and application, and related topics.

The theme conference, scheduled for the morning of Oct 24, will focus on the release of some influential technologies and products; it will highlight signing ceremonies of major projects and strategic cooperation agreements as well as inauguration of many innovation platforms.

The parallel forums, which will include consultations, will be held from Oct 23 to 24, and the specialized sub-forums will be held in Guangzhou’s districts of Huangpu and Haizhu, as well as Foshan city.

"Nansha has seen rapid AI industry development since it blew the horn at an AI conference in 2017," said Xie Ming, deputy mayor of the district.  

At first, the district’s enterprise clusters grew stronger, with their scopes of business covering more sectors pertaining to artificial intelligence chips, basic algorithms, biometrics recognition, natural language processing and new human machine interaction.

As a second step, local enterprises are occupying the broader AI market. CloudWalk Technology, the largest supplier of the face-scanning devices for China’s banks, serves more than 400 banks, accounting for 82.8 percent of the market, and Pony. ai has become the country’s most mature autonomous-driving startup.

Third, Nansha has obvious advantages in research and development, given the dozens of innovation platforms that have been set up, including the iFLYTEK South China AI Research Institute and the Guangzhou Industrial Research Institute of Intelligent Software.

In addition, the supporting guarantee system is in full swing.