Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, demonstrated the capabilities of ET Brain, its proprietary artificial intelligence program designed for different verticals and cities to tackle real-world challenges, at GITEX Technology Week 2018.
Under Alibaba Cloud ET Brain is City Brain, which offers urban planners and city governors the tools to upgrade their city governance such as improving real-time traffic management, pollution control and smart drainage systems. Eleven cities around the world have implemented ET City Brain in the past three years since it was launched.
A feature of the Alibaba Cloud ET City Brain is the Elastic Green Wave Corridor, which synchronizes traffic signals to design the most efficient route for ambulances and other priority vehicles, with the least interference to traffic. With City Brain deployed to Hangzhou, it takes just 20 seconds for the AI algorithm to detect a road incident and deploy respondents, with a 95 percent accuracy rate.
Dr Wanli Min, Chief Machine Intelligence Scientist at Alibaba Cloud, said: “Data, computation power and algorithm are the three factors behind Alibaba Cloud ET Brain, which in turn produces actionable insights. This insight is harnessed to enhance traffic management in populated cities and to even calculate the precise amount of irrigation required for crops on a rice plantation.”
“What we are showcasing at Alibaba Cloud are not just theoretical results from research labs, but actual field tests in cities and industries with our solutions. Ultimately, we are empowering decision makers to take actions in a preemptive way, and not just in response to a problem. We plan on taking a deeper dive in the vertical domains, especially in the Middle East where we are witnessing the next wave of digital transformation. We are also aiming to be a part of Dubai Expo 2020, one of the biggest events to take place in the region,” added Dr Min.
For vertical solutions, Alibaba Cloud has created ET Medical Brain for the healthcare sector, ET Industrial Brain for companies to centralize data management and to utilize data, ET Environmental Brain to cross analyze environmental data such as temperature, wind speed, pollution, ET Aviation Brain, to optimize operating efficiency and reduce flight delays and ET Agriculture Brain, to empower farm managers with real-time analysis of their farms and animals.
Alibaba Cloud’s Chief Machine Intelligence Scientist Dr Wanli Min was on the GITEX keynote panel, along with senior executives from LinkedIn, Google and Microsoft to discuss how AI is transforming decision making in major sectors. Dr Min also headlined two sessions, one on Alibaba’s digital transformation journey and presented a case study on how to develop a neural network across a city.
