Speed, reliability, security get companies' attention
Fifteen world-class scientific and technological achievements were launched on Wednesday during the ongoing 3rd World Internet Conference (WIC) in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejiang Province. [Special coverage]
Those achievements, which were developed by well-established domestic and foreign technology companies and institutions, mainly involve artificial intelligence (AI), cyber security, self-driving and virtual reality.
"They were selected from among more than 500 applications by a Recommendation Committee consisting of 33 experts around the world," Wu Hequan, Chinese director of the Recommendation Committee and president of the Internet Society of China, said during the launch ceremony.
This is the first time for the WIC to host such a release, which impressed many attendees including Lucas Rondez, a founder of an Internet company in China.
"What I realize is that many technologies focus on making speed and reliability even more important as well as improving security," Rondez told the Global Times on Wednesday.
The Swiss entrepreneur is the CEO of Hangzhou Boru Network Technology Co.
During the release ceremony, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Kaspersky Lab wowed the world with their breakthroughs in cyber security.
A research unit of CAS aims to secure communications with its quantum technology, which has already been adopted in the national defense sector and banking system.
About 295 attacks occurred in the industry segment during 2015, increasing from 245 in 2014, according to Moscow-based Kaspersky.
AI was also a highlight. IBM and Baidu showcased their capabilities in this segment with the introduction of Watson 2016 and Baidu Brain, respectively. Both target industries such as medical treatment.
The AI projects introduced were indeed impressive, and "as (Alibaba founder) Jack Ma Yun has said, we previously made humans become machines and now we have to focus on making machines become human, especially by using big data," said Rondez.
At the event, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding unveiled the technology that supported the smooth run of the 120.7 billion yuan ($18 billion) in transactions generated by its online marketplace during the Double 11 shopping spree. A proprietary distributed relational database management system called OceanBase, which is based on Alibaba's cloud computing platform Apsara, takes the credit. With the cloud-based database OceanBase, Alipay can handle 120,000 transactions per second, according to a press release that Ant Financial, Alibaba's financial arm, sent to the Global Times on Wednesday.
In addition, Microsoft's augmented reality headset HoloLens, Huawei's homegrown mobile processor Kirin 960 and Germany-based SAP's solution for Industry 4.0 are among the technological achievements in the spotlight at the event.
