Under the auspices of its Asia’s Innovation Resource Platform (AIRP), 36Kr Global aims to accelerate the development of cross-border economic flows and help industry stakeholders explore business opportunities with each other.
To this end, AIRP, together with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB) and Vulcan AI, and artificial intelligence (AI) company, jointly an online sharing session to exchange ideas on industrial visualization hardware and AI machine vision development. Two other industry experts, BroadVision and Uni-Ubi, to offer insight on industrial machine vision and AI security solutions.
Ethan Lim, from the Global Innovation Alliance Programme Office of the Singapore Economic Development Board, emphasized that the EDB aimed to assist the establishment of strategic partnerships between Singaporean and Chinese companies. In a similar vein, Vulcan AI’s CEO, Manik Bhandari, also expressed his gratitude to participating companies and expressed a desire to identify future project partners in hardware manufacturing and machine vision solutions.
A short summary of the insights shared during the event can be found below.
Discussions have been adapted and translated for public release.
Topic 1: Uses of machine vision in heavy equipment
BroadVision is a provider of AI vision solutions for heavy equipment. The company’s research and development (R&D) team uses special outdoor cameras for heavy equipment for front-end operations and develops AI visual algorithms for back-end development. It has made breakthroughs in the fields of human body recognition and collision avoidance, container keyhole recognition, and double-box recognition. This is important in port logistics, where working conditions are complex and blind spots need to be eliminated to improve operational safety and efficiency.
Wu Hainan, the founder of BroadVision, shared success cases and partnerships the company has entered into in the port industry, including with Singapore’s PSA, Shanghai port, ZPMC, Volvo, and Caterpillar. He emphasized that several core camera technologies in the heavy equipment field, such as compactness, anti-shaking capabilities, resistance to extreme cold and heat, and high sensitivity to light, enable the hardware to maintain efficient and safe working conditions in a variety of environments. Real-time information collected by the camera is also transmitted to background computers for big data and AI processing and analysis, which helps to ensure low latency and high recognition rates.
Wu also explained in the detail the company’s self-developed HAECO intelligent auxiliary driving system — BrADAS. Utilizing its machine vision AI system, the crane can observe its surroundings flexibly with low latency and a high degree of stability. The ability to observe the operating conditions around the crane helps the driver use the crane to accurately grasp objects. Functions such as personnel proximity warnings and truck positioning can also improve the efficiency and safety of port operations.
Topic 2: Applications of IoT in the pan-security long-tail market
Uni-Ubi is a one-stop IoT intelligent vision solutions provider for the pan-security long-tail market, with AI, IoT, AIoT, and edge computing device development at its core. In 2015, it ranked third place for FDDB (Face Detection Data Set and Benchmark) datasets, and ranked second for LFW (Labeled Faces in the Wild) datasets. In 2020, it successfully closed its Series B1 and Series B2 rounds of financing, raising RMB 300 million in total (USD 45 million).
At the sharing session, Zhan Tianyu, vice president of business and Shanghai general manager, introduced the rich variety of scenarios that the company could offer through its WO platform and Uface series of hardware devices. Based on the business capabilities of its WO platform and flexible, customizable interface services, combined with its smart devices and AI capabilities, Uni-Ubi is confident that it can provide solutions across a wide range of scenarios. This includes solutions for smart offices, community security, smart hotels, safe campuses, smart construction sites, and supermarket and retail chains.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Uni-Ubi capitalized on its technological advantages to quickly launch a self-developed facial recognition algorithm for masked settings. It combined its recognition products such as thermal imaging temperature measurement equipment and wrist temperature measurement to help customers resume production quickly and contribute to the alleviation of the pandemic.
Aside from this Uni-Ubi has also proposed special smart business solutions for vision-based business operation systems. For example, it can utilize smart devices in large shopping malls to obtain facial data, upload this to the cloud, to compare and analyze shopper behaviors. Customer flow statistics, traffic path trajectories, heat map analyses, member recognition, and other retail solutions can empower shopping malls to obtain real-time information to assist in decision making.
Uni-Ubi’s business strategy involves international outreach, and it has therefore established strategic bases in Europe, Asia, and Africa. It has also established distributorships in India, Russia, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, Mexico, Turkey, Spain, and Argentina, among other countries. Its strong history of cooperative partnerships and view to international markets has enabled it to be present in over 40 countries
Zhan and Bhandari had an extended discussion on details of Uni-Ubi’s potential cooperative partnerships. Zhan noted that Uni-Ubi is open to flexible and diverse forms of cooperation, and aside from supporting OEMs, it can also send SDKs to third parties and even support purchasers of their own AI technology. Uni-Ubi’s smart products are hardy even in areas of low network connectivity or power supply because its devices have both built-in data and cloud services, making its products very versatile.
36Kr Global’s cross-border innovation team, AIRP, will be organizing further sharing sessions with Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB) and other large Singaporean companies. Stay tuned for more updates!
About 36Kr Global AIRP
Asia has surpassed other regions to become the largest economy in the world. As mentioned, each region has its advantages and characteristics. We have observed an increasing number of big corporates deploying their innovation strategies without geographic limitation and trying to find best-fit solutions across regional markets like China, SEA, India, and Japan. However, it is challenging for corporates to reach outside of the organization to scout for technology and collaboration partners.
AIRP (Asia’s Innovation Resource Platform), a cross-border consulting team under 36Kr Global, has been committed to connecting large enterprises and start-ups in various regions, helping them realize innovation transformation and finding potential partners. Whether you are a large enterprise or a start-up, if you are interested in being part of our network or have any inquiries about AIRP, reach us at partnerships@kr-asia.com!
