Shanghai
Garbage sorting robot, “nutritional diet” for tomatoes, wearable health devices — a future with artificial intelligence (AI) were all tangible and visible at the second China International Import Expo held on 5-10 November in Shanghai. When visiting Shanghai for the first time, where strict garbage sorting policies are being newly enforced, one could feel a bit lost while holding wrappers or empty cups in hands, not knowing which waste container to throw them into. However, any sorting questions, one may have, could be answered by a garbage sorting robot at the booth of ABB, a Swiss digital technology giant.
Various items of garbage were carried to a black box where the well-designed AI algorithms identified their shapes and located their positions within 100 milliseconds with an accuracy of 98 to 100%. Afterward, a collaborative robot dropped them into proper waste bins.
With a wider application and faster calculation, the system will be soon put into use in seafood processing factories and is hoped to be applied in material sorting and quality inspection in the future, said Liu Qianjin, country technology officer with ABB China. “The next leap of AI development lies in manufacturing,” he said, adding that compared to the consumer-oriented
AI industry which has been well developed, intelligent manufacturing is in its infancy and requires more advanced technology as well as deeper cooperation between global innovators.
From manufacturing to agriculture, medical treatment to daily travel, the transformation AI is bringing to the world was on full display at the expo.
At a booth twice the size of last year, Japanese electronics manufacturer Omron Corporation built a smart greenhouse to show how tomatoes were taken good care of by its “Sensing, Control + Think” system, which was installed in an intelligent agricultural garden in eastern China’s Wuxi city. “We have developed closer and more direct communication with our Chinese partners from last year’s expo,” said Tsutomu Igaki, executive officer of Omron. “As a first-class international expo, the CIIE embodied the strong purchasing power of China as the world’s second largest economy.” To make future healthcare more visible and accessible to visitors,
Electa, an international medical firm from Sweden, showcased a live teleconsultation supported by AI and 5G, connecting doctors from five different hospitals. It took only 10 minutes with a
90% precision rate for AI to draw a sketch for the nasopharyngeal cancer target region that a senior doctor would need at least two to three hours to complete.
AstraZeneca, another medical big name, announced at the expo that it would upgrade its Shanghai R&D platform to a global R&D centre and establish an AI innovation center. A 12lead wearable electrocardiograph device was one of the showcased medical technologies at
AstraZeneca’s booth. With AI-assisted diagnosis system, it can monitor patients’ condition outside of the hospital and alert in real-time to prevent myocardial ischemia.
