On Mar 30, 2019, the first China (Shanghai) city brain workshop was held in Shanghai
The first China (Shanghai) city brain workshop. Photo: Credit to Ali Cloud
On Mar 30, 2019, the first China (Shanghai) city brain workshop was held in Shanghai. Many experts attended to the summit including FENG Songlin (封松林), the expert from Chinese Academy of Sciences; Mohamad Sawan, the Academician of IEEE; MIN Wanli (闵万里), the chief scientist of Ali Cloud Machine intelligence. The experts and scholars talked a lot about the building of the digital city platform, and they agreed that the city brain, as the infrastructure of the digital city, is essential and its industrial model could be massively copied and spread.
According to LU Xiaoyuan (陆肖元), who is the director of the Shanghai Pudong’s smart city develop the center, the city brain has become the essential infrastructure of the digital city. With the cooperation of Ali Cloud and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, since last October, Shanghai Lingang(临港) has begun to use drones ordered by the city brain to monitor the city. The drones could fly to the district within 5 minutes and fly more than 100 kilometers per day. The city brain helped more than 100 public servants to serve 100 thousand people and 80 thousand enterprises located in the Lingang area.
MIN Wanli said that the ET city brain could not only cut down on the human resources but also save the cost for infrastructure. With the city brain that relieves traffic congestion, the government could save a lot of money to build new streets. MIN Wanli said that “On Hangzhou’s experimental area, people saved 15.3% time on traveling, and the time that takes an ambulance to arrive was cut by half. If we want to achieve this result by broadening the road, it would require billions of CNY.”
Professor Mohamad Sawan, who is the academician of Canada Engineering Institute and IEEE Fellow, gave the high evaluation of the effect of city brain. According to Sawan, in his hometown Montreal, as well as many foreign cities, they have the application situation of AI and IoT. However, not as good as the city brain in China. In terms of the application of IoT, China did a better job. Sawan believed that in the future, every city needs a brain like this to better and promote the environment, medical and education level of the city, and make it a better place for citizens to live.
According to the summit, with 3 years of innovation and self-study, the city brain keeps updating and the fields it can serve is broadening. On the Lantern Festival of 2019, Quzhou city used the city brain to achieve the “autonomous management” of transportation and increased the passing efficiency by up to 40%. The city brain could be widely used in the concert, physical competition, etc.
Currently, the Ali Cloud city brain have settled in several cities including Hangzhou, Suzhou, Quzhou, Beijing, Singapore, Macao, etc. The city brain connects with thousands of sensors and air-monitor equipment to provide information to the Housing and Construction Bureau and the Environment Bureau. The brain could accomplish a whole-area scanning within 10 minutes and help the government to improve working efficiency. This proves that the field that city brain serve changes from transportation to digital government.