Revolutionary advances changing your life

Mini-programs in Tencent’s WeChat, Baidu’s Apollo open-source automatic driving platform, US electric car pioneer Tesla and 360 Group’s cyber security are among 15 top technological achievements named at the World Internet Conference in China yesterday.

They were chosen from 400 entries from China and around the world, including the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Russia and Canada.

Other winners included the fully-integrated 5G NR Millimeter Wave and Sub-6 GHz RF Modules — critical to the next generation 5G mobile service — from US chip giant Qualcomm, the supET Industrial Internet Platform of Alibaba Cloud and technological support for smart homes from Microsoft and Xiaomi.

The selection committee of 40 Chinese and foreign experts, co-chaired by Whitfield Diffie, winner of the 2015 Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, and Wu Hequan, from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said the winners showcased innovative breakthroughs in the mobile Internet.

WeChat mini-programs are small applications that function within the instant messaging platform, freeing users from the trouble of downloading or installing apps separately. 

Currently, more than 1.5 million app developers extract the core functions of their products and build them into mini programs without developing separate programs and terminal adaptations for iOS and Android systems, which “offers a Chinese solution to the global problem of cross-system app development,” Pony Ma, chairman and CEO of Tencent, told the conference.

Another winner was Ascend 310, an artificial intelligence processor developed by Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei.

With the capacity to process thousands of pictures in a second, Ascend 310 can provide technological support for driverless vehicles and automatic production lines.

In October, Huawei and Audi announced a joint innovation in L4 automatic driving, unveiling the new Audi Q7 as a demonstration of this state-of-the-art technology. 

L4 is high automation on the scale of 0-5 and applied to vehicles that can operate autonomously only under select conditions.

The total energy consumption of the processor can be reduced to about 200 watts, said Yan Lida, director and president of Huawei’s BG enterprise.

Qualcomm’s fully-integrated 5G NR Millimeter Wave and Sub-6 GHz RF Modules for smartphones and other mobile devices, a world first, allow terminal device producers to offer attractive form factors combined with the benefits of extremely high speeds from mmWave 5G NR.

The market launch of such devices could be as early as the first half of 2019.

Microsoft also provides a security solution, named “Azure Sphere,” for the Internet of Things. 

Microsoft Executive Vice President Harry Shum introduced a futuristic scene where users could receive a message from their smart refrigerator, saying “Hello, your freezer compressor has broken down.

“You’d better come home tonight, otherwise the food inside may go bad.”

“As technologies including AI and IoT are spreading widely, the once-a-fantasy ideas can become a reality one day. Nowadays, televisions, light bulbs and alarm clocks all can be controlled by the voice assistant on your phone or an AI loudspeaker,” said Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of the Xiaomi Corporation.