Tomorrow's technologists get the Honeywell Experience
Students try out smart headgear equipped with a camera and embedded with artificial intelligence. It advises workers on the appropriate course of action and lets them to talk to experts around the world.
Students line up to investigate how the future can be exactly as they make it.
It's rare to get the opportunity to quiz the top executives of an organization like Honeywell and the students had plenty of questions.
A hardhat that can help workers make decisions and an aircraft safety system were just two of the technological cynosures that university students got their hands on during an event at the Honeywell Technology Experience Center on Thursday.
About 30 students, from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and East China University of Science and Technology were invited to the “Approaching the Fortune 500” event, part of the 2019 Shanghai Science Festival. “Approaching” helps connect budding researchers with the heavyweight players.
Ken Chen, General Manager of Honeywell Connected Enterprise in China, told the students that traditional manufacturers have to get on board with the Internet of Things if they want to get “smart.”
“It reduces costs, increases efficiency and creates things that traditional manufacturing never could,” he said.
Scott Zhang, global president of Honeywell Technology Solutions, walked the red carpet with Nobel Prize winners and other renowned scientists on Wednesday at the opening ceremony of the science festival.
He said he was greatly impressed with the whole ecosystem for innovation in Shanghai. About 10 years ago, Honeywell did not actually develop any new products in Shanghai, but just imported products from the US. All that changed about five years ago. Zhang called it “local serving local and the world.”
The company has a regional innovation center in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang. Zhang said that Shanghai had great infrastructure, which meant the company usually took less than a month to put together new projects.
The city also benefits from an emerging talent pool. Chen described how becoming a leading technology innovation center was a matter of finding top talent and bringing out the best in new recruits.
“Through this festival, we hope to inspire those young people who are dedicated to science and technology,” he said.
The company has a talent project that makes contact with the most promising local university students and every year 25 to 30 of them join the project. After two years of training, they are invited to join in the company where they work in a wide range of fields.
“You can imagine that after 10 years we have hundreds of them in our company. They are made-in-Shanghai talent and they will become a core power base in Honeywell's future," Zhang said.
Built in 2012, the Honeywell Technology Experience Center has received over 60,000 visitors.
