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Eric Xu
Rotating Chairman, Huawei

Huawei: Live From Huawei Connect 2019 Day 1 Keynote

🎥 Sep 18, 2019 📺 Huawei ⏱ 113m 👁 187158 views
We're streaming live from Shanghai Expo Center. Catch all the highlights of Day 1 at Huawei Connect 2019.
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About Eric Xu

Eric Xu, Rotating Chairman of Huawei, stated at the company’s 2022 Annual Report Press Conference in March 2023 that the year ahead would be “crucial to Huawei's sustainable survival and development,” citing a “challenging external environment” and “non-market factors” that continue to affect operations. He said Huawei would focus on unlocking new growth opportunities, enhancing business resilience, and ensuring product competitiveness. Xu also estimated that Huawei’s addressable markets would exceed one trillion US dollars by 2027. In earlier appearances, Xu commented on the impact of U.S. sanctions on the semiconductor industry, stating that China’s semiconductor industry would “take efforts to self-save” and that he believed it would “realize a very strong and self-reliant industry.” He also discussed Huawei’s investment in research and development, noting that the company invests more than 10% of revenue annually, and highlighted the role of ICT technology in reducing industrial emissions. At the 2021 Global Analyst Summit, Xu said that “unwarranted U.S. sanctions” could trigger a new global economic crisis<|begin▁of▁file|>.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Eric Xu's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (29 segments)
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Eric Xu0:19
Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Awaken now in the beautiful autumn, this year we are gathered again at the Shanghai Expo Exhibition and Convention Center for our annual conference. This morning, I went through the stadium very early on my way here. I noticed that there is more traffic than previous years, and so I have to thank all of you. This is an extraordinary moment. Thank you for your support.
Yesterday when I was at a meeting, a lot of friends that I generally don't see, they asked me, 'Are you okay? Are you doing okay?' I think that it's a little heartwarming, their questions. For the past six months, Huawei has been put under pressure, and thank you. I'd like to give you an update. I think that we are doing fine. I don't think I need to say much, you can see just the weather. We are very lucky in Shanghai, so autumn blue skies. You know what I saw this year? You might be wondering, is this the same Huawei? There is that because of your support, that is why we're able to handle the challenges we're faced with. And it's because of your support that we're able to move forward. And I can guarantee you, we will not disappoint.
Two years ago, we announced our new vision, which is to bring digital to every person, home, and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. And now we believe there are two key technologies that we should continue to invest in and innovate in. And these two key technologies are connectivity and computing. As I said, in the industry, you know of Huawei as a company because of connectivity. It's true that we have made significant investments in connectivity for the past three decades, and we have made quite a lot of achievements. However, we are not a company that just does business in connectivity. We believe that connectivity and computing are equally important for us to build an intelligent world. Computing and connectivity are the two key technologies. They are inseparable, they are mutually enforcing, and they move forward step by step. Setting the stage, wherever there is a connection, you will have computing, and wherever there is computing, you have connections as well.
In fact, we have been investing in computing for 10 years, and you must have heard of our achievements in computing. And today, when we're moving into the future, we become more acutely aware of the fact that computing is a technology that we should invest in. And I would like to take this opportunity to share with you some of our thoughts. On behalf of Huawei, I would like to give you a systematic review of our computing strategy. To start with, I will share with you some of our observations. In 1946, the first computer was invented. It's been over 70 years. Computers have become smaller and smaller, from mainframe computers to PCs, from desktops to laptops, tablets to smartphones, and wearables. They're becoming smaller and smaller, however, more and more powerful. More importantly, computers have become an extension of human beings, and we see boundless potential in the future of computing as an industry. With this, we believe more powerful computing is going to be one of the most important driving forces for enhancing human capacity.
We have also observed the changes in computing models. I majored in science and engineering subjects, and when I was in university, I got to use computers. Then, when I was learning programming, the teacher told us that a computer was a crystal-clear machine. Once you throw an equation at it, it will return a result for you. It was rule-based computing. In that model, it has facilitated a lot of domains. It can be programming, crunching results for formulas, census data analysis, to ballistic analysis. But now, as things change and evolve, the rule-based computing is no longer sufficient. For example, when it comes to image recognition, voice recognition, and such problems, they don't have crystal-clear rules behind them. Even if you can't define clear rules, scientists have come up with a solution, which is called the statistical computing model. Statistical computing can help us address the problems that are not definable with clear rules. Statistical computing has laid down the foundation for artificial intelligence. This is a reason why AI is able to see many breakthroughs. Let me have a bold forecast: I think this statistical computing is going to become mainstream, and we estimate that five years from now, statistical computing will consume computing power as much as 80% of the total computing power that we use around us in the future.
With these trends in mind, we've got good reason to believe computing is now entering into the new intelligent world. So in this intelligent computing world, we think that we must pay attention to several key defining features. First, in this new age, there will be a heavy reliance on computing power. Statistical computing itself is essentially a brute-force computing. It's got a heavy reliance on computing power. To give you one example, if you would like to teach a computer to recognize a cat, you have to train it by feeding it well over 1 million images. And this kind of training is power-hungry. And needless to say, astronomical exploration and weather forecasts and such are just going to consume more computing power. Second, computing will be ubiquitous because intelligence will be ubiquitous. We don't think that computing is only constrained to the central nodes. There was a view that computing would be all on the cloud, but we don't think such a view is the whole picture, because computing is not constrained to the central nodes. In the intelligent computing age, the central node will have powerful computing, on the edge we have specialized edge computing, for example, the one used for genome sequencing, and we'll also have computing on the device, reflecting individual needs. When you use your smartphones, your wearables, and your smart glasses, or even your smart earphones, they will be equipped with computing capabilities. So that from central to edge to device, computing will be everywhere. We think that ubiquitous computing will be a new feature for the intelligent computing era. With that in mind, we need a better cloud-edge-device cooperation. We believe the most ideal way to cooperate between these three is at the center, you've got brute-force computing to train the general-purpose model. The general-purpose model can better support the computing on the edge and on the device. If computing on these three can coordinate with each other, you can have optimal computing efficiency and superior user experience. In this case, you don't have to upload all your personal data to the cloud. So in a sense, it provides for better privacy protection. For the data you don't want to upload to the cloud, you can process it on the device.
When we are faced with such defining features, we believe that the industry has a lot to overcome. For example, the computing architecture, the supply of computing power and servers for different scenarios, processors for different scenarios, and even better connectivity. Huawei believes that when we're faced with the challenges, there are always more opportunities. The bigger the challenge is, the bigger the opportunity is. We believe in the coming 10 years, we will see a decade of golden era for the computing industry. Despite the challenges and difficulties we have faced, we are in a new blue-ocean market. And this is data from IDC. We believe that within five years, the computing sector may reach a two-trillion US dollar market. Based upon this prediction, Huawei will firmly invest in the computing sector. And next, I'd like to share with you Huawei's computing strategy.
Huawei's strategy in the computing sector consists of four parts: architecture innovation, investment in processors, sticking to the strategy of doing certain areas and choosing not to do certain areas, and an open ecosystem. So first, I'd like to talk about innovation in architecture. Maybe you know that Huawei has already launched the Da Vinci computing architecture. Why did we choose to do so? Based upon the insights that I have presented, when intelligence is pervasive and when computing is everywhere, computing power will become a critical resource or bottleneck. Well, today in the whole industry, computing power is already very scarce. Computing power is highly dependent on the efficiency of processors. As Moore's Law has almost reached its limit, the whole industry is in urgent need of a new architecture in order to find more computing power. And this is a demand of the whole industry. From Huawei's business strategy perspective, we have device business, network business, and also cloud services. Huawei itself needs a new architecture in order to cover device, edge, cloud, all scenarios. With this background, it is very natural for Huawei to develop the Da Vinci architecture. And it is the only architecture that can cover all the scenarios, including device, cloud, and edge. And this is the foundation for us to build an intelligent industry.
Huawei is also fully aware that we needed to provide more competitive processors so we will have core competitiveness. You can see that Huawei has already launched processor series for different scenarios. For example, for general-purpose computing, we have launched Kunpeng processors. And we have Ascend series for AI, and Kirin series for smart devices. And also, we have launched Honghu processors for smarter screens. In the future, we will launch more series of processors to cover a wider range of scenarios. Regarding our strategy, business strategy in the computing sector, the key question when it comes to business strategy is what is the business boundary? What we choose to do and what we choose not to do. So first of all, Huawei has no plan to sell processors independently. So what we will do, we will provide cloud services to our customers, and also we will provide some components like cards and boards to our partners. We'd like to support our partners to produce finished goods and full equipment. And there are three key figures. The first one is hardware opening. We will make our server mainboard, AI modules, and cards available to our partners, so our partners can develop finished goods and solutions. And second, we will make our software available through open source. The server OS, database, and AI development frameworks will be available through open source. Our partners can use the open-source versions to develop commercial versions, making software development easier. And third, Huawei has no plan to develop applications, but we will provide the tools and teams to help our partners to develop applications and migrate their applications. These are our overall business strategy.
And fourthly, we realized that the computing sector is highly reliant on the open ecosystem. So this is also an area of focus for Huawei. Talking about ecosystem, maybe you still remember that four years ago, in 2015, Huawei released the first version of the Huawei Developer Program. Over the past four years, we have made significant progress with this program. We have developed over 1.3 million developers and over 14,000 ISV partners. I know that among the audience, many of you are our developers and ISV partners. I really appreciate your efforts and support. Your support has made us more confident towards the future. So in this year's Huawei Connect, I'd like to take this opportunity to announce the new round of Huawei Developer Program. We commit to invest 1.5 billion US dollars to expand the developer community. We hope that in the future, the developer community will increase from 1.3 million to 5 million. On the third day of this conference, my colleague will share more details about this with you.
So just now, I have talked about Huawei's computing strategy, the four aspects. And next, I'd like to talk about some of the progress we have made based upon this strategy. First, general-purpose computing strategy. We have already launched Kunpeng series processors. We'll continue to invest in its servers, OS, database, compilers, and other key technologies and products. The purpose is through strategic investment to connect to the whole value chain and give our partners confidence in its growth potential and build out the Kunpeng ecosystem. And right now, we're working with partners to lay the foundation for the Kunpeng ecosystem. We're working with partners from different places to leverage the local strengths to build different communities for Kunpeng innovation. And these innovation hubs will become a platform where partners across the ecosystem will get together, and we can carry out application pilots, cultivate talent, and develop standards as a team. This work has already started, and we've received very good feedback so far. In Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Xiamen, and several other cities, we have implemented this strategy, and we look forward to seeing more partners join us across the ecosystem. We have great confidence in building the Kunpeng ecosystem together with our partners. So that's about general-purpose computing.
And next, let's look at AI computing. Last year, Eric Xu announced our full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio on this very stage. Back then, frankly speaking, we had only launched part of the components. We've heard some concerns from our partners. They were wondering when Huawei would put all of those things into reality. I want to say that every year, Huawei Connect is also a place for Huawei to answer all the questions and address the concerns. This year, we have fully implemented the full-stack, all-scenario AI portfolio strategy. Ascend series processors are already shipped. For example, we have launched Ascend 910. And also, the AI computing framework, we also announced a full AI software stack. On Huawei Cloud, we have provided the training and the inference services. Well, also, we have a series of servers and processors being used in Huawei's devices. So today, I can assure you that Huawei's full-stack, all-scenario AI solution has been fully implemented. So you should be assured to work with us.
Talking about AI, based upon the full-stack, all-scenario AI solution, I want to announce another heavyweight product at this stage. Please enjoy a video.
This is Atlas 900. It is the world's fastest AI training cluster, combining the power of thousands of Ascend processors. So how fast is it? I want to show some figures with you here. ResNet-50 is the industry standard for measuring AI training performance. It is an industry-standard model. We used this model to test our Atlas 900. Atlas 900 has finished the entire training in just 59.8 seconds. Compared to the second performer, it is 10 seconds faster. You might think 10 seconds is not a very big difference. So what does this mean? Imagine a sprinter in a competition. If the gold medal winner has crossed the finish line and he has enough time to drink a lot of water before the second person arrives, this is the difference between Atlas and the product ranked second. Atlas 900 is a powerhouse of AI computing, and it could be widely used for scientific research and business innovation. You may know that in scientific research and business innovation, computing power has become a bottleneck. I've once heard some friends complain to me, in the universities, in order to run a solution, it may take months or weeks of time, and it may take another month or so to tune it further. Our researchers also complained in Huawei. Well, with Atlas 900's ultimate computing power, all of these complaints will disappear. And next, I'd like to share with you a real case so you can see how Atlas 900 can help scientific research. Please enjoy another video.
Let's welcome Mr. Philip Diamond, the Director General of the Square Kilometre Array Organisation.
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Philip Diamond30:31
Good morning. I join you here in Shanghai at the Huawei Connect conference. The SKA is a revolutionary radio telescope that will help us to study and understand gravity at a fundamental level, and utilizing the SKA's unique capability to study hydrogen, the most common element in the universe, to uncover the secrets of what we call the cosmic dawn and the birth of stars and galaxies. Ambitious projects like the SKA can only happen when governments, scientists, engineers, and industry come together with a common goal. The SKA Organisation, which has been managing the design phase of the project, is supported by 13 countries and brings together hundreds, even thousands of engineers and scientists from institutions around the world. In the SKA, the sun truly never sets. China is strongly involved in the project and has actually been a key partner since its inception. Next year, we will witness the birth of the SKA Observatory, solidifying further the partnerships between the many nations involved and providing the stability that the SKA will need for the coming decades. The SKA will then become an intergovernmental organization, similar to CERN and ESO, and only the second in the world dedicated to astronomy. 'Be brave to explore' was the instruction from China's Vice Minister of Science and Technology, Zhang Guoqiang, when he signed the convention of the SKA Observatory in March. That is what we do. So what are we actually building? To achieve the levels of sensitivity and spatial resolution we need, and to cover the range of frequencies required, the SKA will use many connected antennas, known as arrays, which can act together. The SKA will have two such arrays with different technologies, one in South Africa and one in Australia, both in very remote regions of the world. These remote locations allow us to get away from artificially generated interference, which would pollute the extremely faint radiations that we wish to detect. In South Africa, we will be building close to 200 large dishes, and in Western Australia, there will be more than 130,000 smaller dipole antennas. But this is just the start. We are aiming to greatly expand both telescopes in the future, and all of this will be managed from our global headquarters at Jodrell Bank in the United Kingdom. You can see on the screen behind me what the telescopes will actually look like. But in fact, we already have hardware on the ground, and before official construction starts in 2021, we have built prototype instruments and deployed them on site. China has been leading the design of the SKA dishes and have built two prototypes, one of which is at the CETC-54 factory at Xiji County, and the second is currently being tested on site in South Africa.
When you build an enormous radio telescope, the aim is to gather as much information as possible from the universe, and that means dealing with a lot of data. The SKA antennas themselves will send a huge volume of data to the massive digital systems and supercomputers, one in each of the two host countries, where the data will be processed to allow astronomers to undertake their scientific investigations. This is a data-intensive process that will initially require around 50 petaflops of dedicated signal processing power, growing to 250 petaflops as our capability increases. In total, every year we will archive around 600 petabytes of data, dwarfing the amounts currently handled by platforms such as Facebook and Google. Major research infrastructures like the SKA have a long history of driving innovation and making an impact on wider society. I'm sure you are all familiar with the fact that CERN in France and Switzerland developed the World Wide Web. Maybe less known, but equally relevant, is the development of Wi-Fi that a large majority of you in this room are using probably right now. This was invented by radio astronomers in Australia who were trying to process signals coming from black holes. Of course, I didn't bring my crystal ball today, so I can't really predict what the spin-offs will be generated by the SKA, but there's an enormous potential for us to have a similar impact through developments in areas like data visualization, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. In fact, our partners here at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory have already been working with Huawei in this area, applying machine learning techniques to astronomy problems such as pulsar searches and radio galaxy detection using simulated SKA images. They will run a demonstration here in a few minutes. AI's ability to speed up data analysis will be invaluable when the SKA is operational, when we're dealing with these enormous data volumes. To make the 600 petabytes of data accessible, we are making an alliance of regional data centers, analogous to the CERN tiered computing network. This will allow scientists from around the globe to explore the data in new ways and hopefully unearth new scientific discoveries. Our colleagues at the Shanghai Observatory are leading on this front, and they recently completed a prototype SKA data center, which will provide us with great insight into how SKA data could be stored and accessed in the future. The excitement and momentum within the SKA partnership is building as we approach the start of construction, and I look forward to the day in 2025 when scientists from around the world, including here in China, will get their first glimpse of the universe through the eyes of the SKA. Thank you very much.
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Eric Xu39:12
Thank you, Philip Diamond, for your presentation. Just now, we can clearly perceive the significance of astronomical exploration. Philip Diamond has also shared with us the SKA's mission and their contribution in this area. From his presentation, we are able to perceive that when they are processing massive data, what other challenges they might encounter. Huawei has worked with SKA and SHAO in this area, and Atlas 900 is the right product for this scenario. So I want to demo to you how Atlas can help in this scenario. This is a sky map of the southern hemisphere. It is very beautiful, but this is not an image that you can see with your naked eyes, because in this image, there are over 200,000 stars. For the human eye, we may see a maximum of 6 to 60 million stars. Well, this map was compiled with data from SKA radio telescopes. In astronomical exploration, if we are to search out of the over 200,000 stars and identify stars with a certain specific feature, with previous technologies, we need to rely on very experienced scientists to take 169 days. That means one scientist needs to use 169 days to do so. With Atlas 900, it could be much faster. So let's take a look how Atlas can help.
It's just 10.02 seconds. This is the real data of scanning using Atlas 900. It's just 10.02 seconds. Atlas can scan over 200,000 stars and identify stars with specific features. So from 169 days to 10.02 seconds, this is great to look forward to. And this is a reward made possible by Atlas 900. Huawei is very eager to bring this super computing power to more industries and more scientific research domains. So today, I'd like to announce that we have already deployed Atlas 900 on Huawei Cloud. So from now on, maybe you can take your phone out, you can scan the QR code to register and have a try. Ladies and gentlemen, the achievements made in technical innovation is helpful for all different industries to go digital and become intelligent. This has boosted our confidence, and we believe that as all different industries are going digital, the market potential of the computing sector is further expanded. In the next 10 years, Huawei will work together with our partners to embrace the booming computing sector. Isn't this a huge opportunity? Huawei chose to start with innovation on computing architecture and processor development, which are the two most difficult areas. We are actively working with our partners to create a healthy and open ecosystem. We believe such a choice is consistent with Huawei's DNA. I've worked in Huawei for 30 years. In my understanding, Huawei is a company that is willing and good at taking the long road, because we firmly believe that as a technology company, our mission is to bring the best of technologies to people who need it, and to solve the toughest problems and make the impossible possible. And we believe such efforts will expand to the whole industry. More opportunities will also be created for our partners in the future. We strongly believe that we need to work together with our partners to enter into a new age of exploration, to explore the potential of this new sector. We look forward to seeing a thousand ships sailing together, rather than just to be on our own. We welcome more partners to join us in this new journey. And I hope that this year's Huawei Connect is a stage for discussions, for collaboration. I look forward to seeing our partners engaging with each other and creating new ideas. There's huge potential in the computing sector. Let's work together and seize this historical opportunity and advance intelligence to new heights.
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Host46:13
Thank you, Mr. Xu, for sharing Huawei's computing strategy and AI cluster launch. Next, please welcome Professor Gao Wen, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, director of Pengcheng Laboratory, professor of Peking University, and an ACM Fellow, to give a speech on 'Pengcheng Cloud Brain: Powering an Open Innovation Platform for AI'.
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Gao Wen47:24
Distinguished guests, friends, good morning. Just now, Ken gave an excellent speech. Indeed, connectivity is more important to our age. In this era, computing power that connectivity will enable us to do another lofty mission. In early days, as you know, computing was meant to resolve engineering problems, such as the trajectory of guiding missiles, ballistic missiles. So for those computing, you have a fixed formula and certain parameters as inputs, and the computers will resolve the problem by working the equation. That is some computing model with certainty, as Ken mentioned. So computing power is increasing. We are not satisfied with only asking the computer to resolve such equations or functions. We hope that computers can also think like human beings and recognize images, videos, understand speeches. Then the computing will be totally different from the computing of equations. A lot of statistics will be required, and a lot of data need to be fed into machine learning, like the millions or tens of millions of images for machine learning. As I mentioned, there's a lot of throughput of data and also a real demand for superfast computing in the case of data processing. And this is for engineering. But what will be the future scenario of computing? The future will be computing like our brains. There is a long way to go, but in order to reach our destination, from this moment, we need to think about how we can migrate from intelligent computing to a semi-brain computing. Next, I would like to share with you what we have done to make this happen, what we have been thinking about, and what platform and devices we have put together. We call it Pengcheng Cloud Brain. The main base is headquartered in Shenzhen. As you know, Shenzhen is at the forefront of the reform and opening-up drive. Last year, in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, set up a provincial lab with a target to develop into a national lab. In the US, as you know, there are a lot of national laboratories. Each of them has a specific orientation and tasks. In China, there weren't national labs, at least those in the real sense. Now China is richer and can afford certain basic research. Therefore, China is thinking about developing the national laboratories, platforms, and facilities that go in the US. The Pengcheng Lab was established in Shenzhen. It is expected to undertake the basic research that can honor the national needs for development and security, and so on. And those demands were addressed in a discrete manner in various universities and research institutes. Now we have a new platform formed by such national labs, and Pengcheng Lab is one of them. In the information field, it is an upcoming national laboratory. The information, of course, we will talk about communication, connectivity, as well as computing. And for computing, we position it for AI. For this moment in computing, it is very important for you to develop the Pengcheng Cloud Brain. With that, we hope to cover intelligent healthcare, intelligent transportation, like the traffic jam now we suffer so frequently. So we are going to address all kinds of problems facing the country's development. So we need a model, algorithm, and research platforms to make AI happen and helping us address such problems. In order to address such problems, we need to develop three levels of facilities. The first level is a very strong software platform. As mentioned, computing needs to happen on a platform. Therefore, the cloud brain needs the fundamental level of hardware, and on top of it, we need software that can support an open-source model. Working in the world, there are so many open-source software. For all the mainstream ones, we provide support, and we are also going to put together a more efficient platform, which can make the things in perfect, better. So this is an open and open-source platform for coexistence of multiple systems. On the top level, we are going to develop certain typical applications to empower the society with AI. And the fundamental level, what so where shall we choose and how much computing power shall we plan? These are the key questions we need to answer. We need to support the major applications for AI and train models for them. For example, to train models for facial recognition, you need very good model training. In certain enterprises, facial recognition has been well done. The secret is my data is used to train the models, so the accuracy can be boosted to 97, 98, 99 percent. So that is only one of the many areas. So some other areas have been tried but not very successfully yet, but we can try to train all sorts of models on our platform. How can we structure this platform of hardware? We typically buy NVIDIA and other foreign GPUs, and in China, we also hopefully will use domestic processors. So we have developed such a platform over the past year, but this platform has now generated our computing power of 100 P. But that is not enough for major tasks, and we are going to scale it by 10x, so that it can be 1000 P. So what is going to be the technology that enables this new platform? I'm happy to tell you that we are going to use the latest Huawei Ascend for AI computing. As I mentioned, this platform is scalable. It is not just going to be complete in one go. Depending on the task requirement, it will scale from 100, 250, to 500, and then to 1000 P. So it will scale gradually. Along the way, the evolution is going to be a dynamic process. It will go with the upgrading and updating of software and hardware and system planning. So we are going to also support the clustering of AI. So this is how we design our roadmap. It not only has very strong computing power but also a lot of possibilities for researchers, students, young scientists to use data. So we are going to collect enormous image libraries, which will be open to the researchers and students who don't have data. But if they have, they are welcome to load their data into such libraries. So such a platform is critical to future science. We can think of a lot of domains of application right now, but for some future unknown domains of science, like what is happening in space or in the logical structures, so all these areas of interest can be studied by researchers and students after our platform is open to them. Once we have the hardware layer, we need to make it convenient for users to use. So to increase the convenience, we have put together the engine of computing for the cloud brain, which has an open-source framework. You are using or you are adopting, as long as you have the source code and the computing framework, this open-source Octopus engine for computing will provide the maximum possible support. We are also going to organize a complete ecosystem, and end-to-end support can be provided to domestic researchers, which may have or lack something. So we are going to complete the offering to make the research sustainable for the long term. We call it Octopus. There are different systems, basic research, arms, software, training, architecture. So in this platform, in terms of how to manage the hardware...
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Eric Xu58:29
We have developed at ISM Opinel Octopus. Our engineers are so imaginative, the software and the system are named after marine creature species. This actually manages the hardware. There are several core functions, for example, for the GPUs and the clusters. For single GPUs, the tasks can be managed. We can be managing on a remote basis and in the cloud brain. A lot of computing power is located in Shenzhen, but there are also other partners in other places, such as in Hefei. We have the University of Science and Technology. We also have computing power in Beijing University and in Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. So through our platform, these computing powers can be pulled together and shared among users. As long as the tasks are initiated, the platform will decide where to put the, where to call the computing power to make it more accessible and convenient for the users. So the online distribution and the batch and tasks are possible on our platform. We are actually designing the platform to make it work better. We look forward to the participation of the industry as well as the participation of universities and research institutes. So we have organized an alliance called AISA, the Alliance of Industry Technology Corporation. It is supervised by the Ministry of Science and Technology. There are standardization working groups, IP working groups, and working groups on investment and finance, and open source and covenants. Apart from those working groups, there can be also sector-specific platforms for healthcare, transport, metallurgical operations, as well as certain players in a certain domain see the needs of collaboration. A separate platform will be organized for such a domain. So you will see a long list of such industry-specific platforms. There will be also advanced teams for logistics, healthcare, intelligent vision, and others. So these are the implementation-driven working groups. They will be collaborating and empowering the various applications. To do all this, it is important to develop the standards. The various research bodies and industries use their own algorithms for neural network models and compression. People use different technologies and practices. In order to achieve better interoperability, we are implementing the standards for neural network model representation and compression. Please stay tuned to our work. For the future of AI computing, this is going to be a very important standard. With such standards and organizations, we also need to think about the open source ecosystem for AI. If the ecosystem is underdeveloped, progress will be hard to make. Therefore, we need a very good ecosystem for the entire endeavor. We have thought a lot about the equal members and projects for the open source community. There are also supporting mechanisms and organizations that have been set up. Some require funding through our foundation. Our funding is injected to such organizations so that they can be up and running. In this connection, we have done two things that we believe can generate impact across the board. One is a supporting platform for software hosting. A lot of the open source software are hosted in GitHub or other websites. In China, certain enterprises are doing this and do it well. But since it is done by individual companies, the fairness and other aspects of operation may engender certain concerns among the users. So we would like to do it through this consortium. So through the foundation, we have a developer's open eye community for software hosting. Now you are welcome to upload your software to those hosting platforms. Then the platform will be financed by the foundation and will follow the market approach for the operation. To perform such open eye platform, RISC-V is something that is done by many in China. But where to put the open source parts of the RISC-V? There is a lot of fragmentation in China. To make it easier for Chinese players, we actually would like to provide a centralized support and hosting for RISC-V account hosting. So we will have a central place for people to have an easier dialogue and collaboration. By open source, we would like to empower AI. So far, we have chosen certain domains that will have an impact on the big picture, like transport, finance, healthcare. So the internationalization of these domains will benefit the country at large. Therefore, they are considered as priorities to be done in the first effects. So we are going to pull the resources and do them well. Let's do it by case study. One is internal transportation. There are many mega cities in China that are troubled by traffic jams as well as traffic safety. The mayors are so concerned about this. How can we resolve this challenge? We would like to approach it with AI. So we want to develop a digital retina. If a brain-unified solution can be developed, certain compute can be placed on the edge and some others on the cloud. By combining them, we can produce the optimized system with a brain-unified solution. The results can be better operation, optimal. The system will rapidly improve the success of recognition. So here you can see the video. This is a map of Xiamen City. On this map, you can see that the cities are long and narrow. At different times, traffic jams will happen in different areas. Then once we know this, you will be able to generate an overall plan. So by digital retina, the scheduling can be performed more effectively. In this way, we hope to advance the application of AI. So through the Pengcheng Cloud Brain open platform, the development of AI can be also promoted. What we would like to do in a nutshell is to develop the new generation basic research and open source, open innovation platform for next generation AI. Apart from the input from Huawei and the government level, contribution can be also made to support all the AI players, including researchers, universities, and enterprises, so that we can collaboratively make the contribution from the part of China and my team to the development of AI. So I hope you can follow closely with us. Thank you.
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Host1:07:53
Thank you, Mr. Xu, for sharing some practice on the exascale supercomputing system. Now let's invite Mr. Zheng Li, the President of Huawei Cloud BU, for his presentation: Crossing the Commercial Chasm, Building Inclusive AI.
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Zheng Li1:08:43
Good morning. The topic of my presentation today is Crossing the Commercial Chasm, Building Inclusive AI. Please look at this previous slide, which is very interesting. We can see two curves on both sides of the slide. On the left side, we can see that before 2018, the AI field, the financial and financing volume of AI is spread across different industries and technical fields evenly. It's like spreading things evenly across the entire field. At that time, investment and financing reflect the characteristics of the passion in this field. However, after 2018, we can clearly see another trend. A lot of financing and investment is centered around a few specific industrial scenarios. Meanwhile, it is highly concentrated in a few key fields such as smart mobility, smart city, healthcare, finance, to name a few. So from this chart, we can see that technological passion has been retraced back to the rationality in commerce. To make a new technology inclusive, there are chasms for us to transcend. Mr. Kang, who mentioned in his presentation that the computing power on the cloud has entered into the brute force era, and I call it violence. Theoretical computing power increases by tenfold each year. Why is that? Because from the research perspective, in the past two decades, the research is getting more in-depth, and we can see a growing number of new algorithms and new explorations. For example, in this chart, we can see BERT, GPT, to name just a few. These new algorithms have increased a hundred times of computing power. There's another interesting discovery: that is, over the past three years, you can see the growth of computing power is positively correlated to the number of published papers of AI. In the future of commercial application, only if the algorithm is cost-effective enough can we see the wider application of AI in commercial scenarios. Therefore, we hope that AI computing power can be readily accessible and convenient as electric power we have today. We hope it can be convenient and readily available. Two years ago, also in Shanghai, I shared with you my opinion. I said that computing power will unleash the beauty of algorithms. Today, if you have access to a large amount of computing power, you can test your model and train your model faster than your competitors. At our last year's Huawei Connect, Mr. Xu shared with us his idea. He said that Huawei's capacity to unleash AI has two dimensions. One solution is AI towards the intelligence, the other is towards universities, organizations, research institutes, by which we call AI for All. We also shared with you our opinion. We believe that AI can change three scenarios of productivity. One is repetitive high-volume works in our world, the second is expert experience in real, and the third one is multiple domain collaboration scenarios. How can we empower industry upgrading in these three scenarios so as to achieve efficiency enhancements, expertise transmission, and go beyond the human limits? For the repetitive high-volume works in our world, we mean that in enterprise practice, we need to find those highly repetitive scenarios with very frequent intervals. To give an example, a famous express delivery company called SF Express. We work together with SF Express. Through highly accurate OCR, we can scan the information on delivery sheets so as to replace the purely manual inputs. Express persons can take pictures or take screenshots, and the OCR system will automatically recognize the information of sender and receiver on the sheet. The system can also be used to deal with complex backgrounds, including uneven lighting and unclear pictures, but also even deal with missing pictures. In this way, we can reduce the manual processing time for abnormal situations, increase management efficiency dramatically, and improve user experience. The overall management cost has been brought down by 25%. In the express delivery sector, violent sorting and picking has always been the source of complaints. This behavior will harm consumers' rights and interests and also lead to a large number of claims for damage. The user will have a very poor experience. In this situation, Huawei Cloud Eye intelligent analysis system can have real-time behavior analysis of monitoring video and automatically identify the improper behavior of the pickers, such as tossing, throwing, or even kicking. Now, across 150 operation fields, we have installed 30,000 cameras which have been connected with AI identification systems for improper operation. What about their results? We can see that the hourly rule-breaking operation rate has dropped by 45 percent. The next scenario is expert experience in real. It is easy to understand. It means the accumulation and industrial know-how is integrated in the scenario so that AI can reach the level of assistance to AI. Last year, we worked together with a third-party medical examination institution, which is a listed company called iKang. We worked together with the company, and for the first time, based on personal mythology and through deep learning technology, we have trained an AI-assisted cervical cancer screening model which is very accurate and highly effective. In the past year, the accuracy rate of negative results reading has been over 99%, and the detection rate of positive results reached 99.9 percent. This is the highest level of AI-assisted cervical cancer screening known in the public. Let me share with you another case. It takes a highly qualified cytopathology doctor to read a Pap smear on the microscope six minutes. However, AI only needs 36 seconds. The third scenario is multi-domain collaboration with multiple parameters and complex interdependence. This is typical in industrial management, urban management, as well as logging-based intelligent reservoir identification, knowledge mapping, NLP, and other artificial intelligence technologies. New thoughts, new ideas will be brought into all these sectors. In the past eight years, we have been working on new industries, and we keep saying that Huawei always honors its words through action. In the past year, our Huawei Cloud AI capability has covered over ten industries, including city management, industry, retail, finance, automotive, and family. It includes over 500 projects. Working together with our partners, we help them to embark on the road of intelligent upgrading. As I said for many times, Huawei itself is a global leading electronic manufacturing industry. We understand clearly what problems need to be solved in industrial scenarios. I also shared my ideas with my colleagues in Huawei. What is the idea of B2B? It means your data, your model. Actually, we can help you to solve the problems in your platform. So it is all oriented for our industry partners. The successful practice of these 500 projects, together with well over 100 AI scientists and mathematicians from Huawei, who have reviewed and summarized our practice in these projects, we have found that to implement industry AI projects, it takes not only the platform and enterprises but also joint efforts of many players. That's why we propose this role model. We can see four players are included in this model, including AI platform, ISV, business scenario, and divisive systems and process. So our demand comes from practice, and implementation also happens in the practice. You can see that successfully implemented AI projects need four keys, which is a clearly defined scenario, readily available computing power, continuously evolving service, as well as matching organization and talents. If I look at this model, combining with four keys that will affect the success of a project, we can understand where the commercial chasm of the commercial application of AI technology is. We need to transcend that chasm rather than fall into it. The first key factor is a clear business scenario. We need to understand the problem at its core. Is it about quality? Is it about lowering cost? Or is it about efficiency enhancements? Secondly, which is also important, to solve this problem, we need to have a clearly defined boundary. This boundary should be expressed and defined mathematically. It must be expressed and defined mathematically. Certainly, this scenario should be a closed loop that is predictable rather than an open and unpredictable one. Last but not least, we should be equipped with sufficient data and complete industry know-how in order to solve the problem. That is how to solve the problem related to the scenario we have clearly defined. Let me share with you two cases to explain what kind of scenario is relatively easy and relatively complex. Salient Hope is one of our clients. This scenario looks complex, but the scenario actually can be clearly defined because it has a clearly defined boundary. The problem itself is clear, and the boundary can be expressed and described with mathematical means. We also have sufficient data and know-how to solve the problem. The problem itself is about the color inspection of synthetic fiber. How to improve the quality inspection and also solving the problem of dyeing and missing color to realize commercial value? I would like to invite you to enjoy the next video clip to see how Salient Hope made the leapfrog in quality inspection from merely 100 meters to over ten thousand kilometers with the help of Huawei.
Just now, the children from Salient Hope showed us a scenario that is clearly defined, which can be solved by AI successfully. The next case is not as simple as it seems. The implementation process has been quite difficult. The case is about river restoration. The scenario seems to be simple, but the similar simple scenario is extremely complex. In the beginning, everybody has very high expectations, but during the implementation, we discovered that the scenario is far too complex. First, we need to identify dropping poles, floating litter, and other scenarios. To make things worse, we also need to recognize complex natural environments such as darkness, rainy days, stormy weather. These natural environments also intertwine with human behavior, which makes the level of difficulty even higher. In these situations, the scenario is very difficult to identify. Luckily, we have a very good and determined client. Walking together, actually, we have a very good team and a very good customer. After numerous adjustments, we have conquered difficulties one after another, and we have adjusted and optimized our algorithm continuously. In the end, the recognition rate improved from the initial 50% to 90%. So I shared with you these two cases to tell you how to find the appropriate scenario. It is not a subjective judgment, but rather it is based on the nature of AI. If the scenario is not appropriate, this would be a beginning of a very difficult journey. The second key is computing power readily available. Strong computing power. Mr. Kang, we talked a lot about computing power. I would like to add something more. We can see that computing today is not sufficient and economical, difficult to get, which leads to the fact that our businesses, governments, universities, and research institutes do not have sufficient computing power. When we prepared this slide, my colleagues provided me with a lot of examples. I said, why not use Huawei's own case? So this is a case about Huawei. The number of AI training operations is over four thousand on a daily basis, which means over 32,000 hours daily. But still, there are a lot more on the waiting list in our ModelArts system. There's another anecdote to share with you to tell you how our doctors work well. They would not do the training during office hours. So before they leave the office, there was a lock on the ModelArts and put their model on the model. So we would do the model training at night so that our other colleagues can do the training during daytime. The next day, we will see the results of the training after a whole night of calculation and training. So even if we have invested a lot in model training, the resources of computing power are still scarce. We use Atlas 900, provided in the form of cloud AI cluster service. This is the fastest AI training cluster globally. It is based on Ascend 910 NPU. Through Huawei's integrated communication, bank, and resources scheduling system, we utilize ultra-high-speed training data cache to fully unleash the strong power of Ascend 910. Now our computing power has reached 250 P, which is equivalent to 500,000 pieces of computing power. In the future, we can expand this cluster system on a linear basis. Mr. Hu also shared with you another figure: that is, within 59.8 seconds, there is a typical network of ResNet-50 on top of ImageNet-1K dataset. We have the fastest speech, which is over 12 percent faster than our competitor. Our cluster can unleash such a big mark on computing power. It's because our engineers have optimized the system from software to hardware, especially the gradient synchronization and parallel to many batch computing. From TCP switching to Spine switching, we have achieved all connectivity and obstruction-free high-speed switching network. So there is virtually no delay in our network. We also highly collaborate our chip, software, and hardware, which would unleash abundant computing power. Number three: AI service should be continuously evolving. Traditional IT is based on clear demand and rules, featuring high certainty and the separable development and production. It needs a typical supplier and demanding sites. But this should be changed in the AI era. In particular, deep learning is based on statistical computing. It is based on the model of infinite data set development, which means it may not adapt to all the changes in the environment. Therefore, the key is to build a closed-loop online system including production, operation, development, and training. With such a closed-loop online system, we can utilize the online learning capability to enable the model to adapt to the changing environment continuously and optimize continuously. In this sense, it will become a truly evolving AI service. We often tell our clients, well, if we were to ask to build a system on-premise, it is not the optimal choice because we need a continuously evolving AI, and your system is based on infinite data set development. We created and developed ModelArts, which provides a continuous interaction framework. We provide device and collaboration capability to accelerate the AI evolution speed of enterprises. For the automatic data reinforcement function, for example, when we train the OCR document model, a few pictures can be automatically expanded to over 1,000 pictures to achieve the same progress speed of training. We can save up to 80% manpower. Also, based on our model self-optimization and stop-tuning framework, and based on our multi-dimensional search engine, the result is 8 percent higher than the result of expert model and 6 percent higher than the best performance of automatic optimization. From 91% to 97% in auto mode. In the autonomous driving sector, the ironclad capability can enable data updating of models compared to previous once-in-a-week intervals. On the third day of Huawei Connect, we will announce our new ModelArts 2.0 version with new features, and I highly recommend you to pay close attention to it. And now I will talk about the fourth key factor: organization and talents. The alignment is an active process. We believe that AI should think digital and act human. The wisdom of AI is the digital manifestation of human wisdom. For AI developers, we provide them with a threshold that is easier to use and close to the industry. The threshold should be lower. In combining the AI and industry, we provide ModelArts, a one-stop platform for AI application development. It helps users to build and deploy models and manage the flow covering the entire circle. And for the experts in AI, we are thinking about the collaboration of AI and experts in implementing AI. We provide transparent decision-making rules so that AI can play a better role in assisting decision-making, so as to make the suggestion more acceptable and efficiency higher. It starts from the changes of enterprise organization and process. We cannot use AI by copying traditional IT models. AI needs matching talents, organization, and process to fully unleash efficiency and effectiveness. Now please watch another video. It's about the feelings and observation of experts from Shenzhen Airport.
We have shared with you four key factors to implement AI, which are clearly defined business scenario, readily available computing power, continuously evolving AI service, and organization and talents. Today, we officially announce Huawei Cloud Industrial Intelligent Twins. Huawei Cloud Industrial Intelligent Twins is the industry-oriented smart solution by Huawei. It is an industrial smart upgrading engine. To be more specific, based on the operation strategy of industrial operation, it integrates technology of device, edge, and cloud. Through intelligent recognition engine, intelligent prediction engine, and intelligent optimization engine, we can intelligently analyze and process information and drive smarter production in the physical world. In the industry sector, AI application needs the support from our partners in all walks of life. We hope that our partners can work together with us to accelerate the implementation of AI projects utilizing Industrial Intelligent Twins so that our vision can become a reality. For example, in our cooperation with PetroChina, we use intelligent recognition engine to support reservoir identification. The result is that the reservoir identification time has been reduced by 70%. We worked with Salient Hope to use intelligent prediction engine to dynamically match customer demands. The customer matching efficiency has increased by 28.5 percent. We also worked with Golden Stone Group to use intelligent optimization engine. We introduced AI into the blending and cooking coal quality prediction process. In this way, AI can become any silver bullets for the blender, and we managed to save 10 million per million tons of coking coal. Huawei Cloud Industrial Intelligent Twins can be implemented in different industries, including energy, mining, coking, power, cement, and synthetic fiber, which surely introduce AI into industrial scenarios and accelerate the intelligent upgrading of industry. Today, we are happy to be with us Professor Gong from PetroChina, who will share with us the case of Huawei Cloud in the manufacturing industry. We will see how far we can use Industrial Intelligent Twins to empower oil and gas exploration. Welcome, Professor Gong.
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Gao Wen1:41:40
Good morning, distinguished guests. It is my delight and honor to attend this conference, and I want to thank Huawei for the kind invitation. What I'm glad to share with you today is CNPC's joint exploration with Huawei on the power of cloud, the transformation and upgrading of oil and gas exploration and development. Over the recent years, CNPC or PetroChina has aspired to boost its competitiveness and transform itself into a world-leading comprehensive global energy company. So it has launched the informatization strategy of a shared CNPC. To date, in the domain of exploration and development, 15 information systems have been developed, and the consolidated standards for data models have been defined for 450,000 wells, 500 reservoirs, 7,000 exploration areas. Historical data over 60 plus years have been put under centralized management. And the development and deployment of these systems have significantly advanced the company's efforts to reduce cost, raise productivity, increase reserves, expand capacity, enhance efficiency, and remodel its production information sharing and digital transformation. Moved up forward, let's look at a certain data. In 2018, China imported altogether 440 million tons of oil, raising China's reliance on imported oil to 70%. PetroChina is tasked to ensure China's energy security. Following national strategies, Chinese oil companies have stepped up their exploration and development. But we also know that there is a lot of pressure on such efforts. In recent years, first, it is increasingly difficult in plain terms. The easily recoverable ones have been already done. According to our data, over 70% of the proven reserves are of mid-low, if not ultra-low, permeation. That means there are very high-quality ones. The water content of the developed oil fields is approaching 90%. Therefore, both the reserve and production face great pressure. Second, the profitability is hard to control. The cost of production remains high. Third, environmental protection and green development have posted new challenges to our production. Therefore, so far, we are facing a series of difficulties. A lot of the Chinese and international experts have carried out research and come to the view that AI represents an important solution to many of the challenges in oil exploration and development as the best possible technology and methodology. Our global peers have joined hands with IT giants in recent years. For example, Shell with Microsoft, Total with Google, they have expanded their application of AI and other next-generation IT in exploration and development so as to digitize their business. PetroChina is visionary enough to partner with Huawei and introduce Huawei's Industrial Intelligent Twins into our technology. So with knowledge graph and natural language processing, machine learning, and other AI technologies, a new system is built and computing applications are made. So we are providing intelligent analytics to learn the production management so that we can also expand our reserve and production. The decision-makers can identify patterns from mega data and improve the efficiency and sophistication of operation and management. I trust that this will be a great endeavor to jointly bridge the divide between applications and business. Hereby, I would like to present you the cognitive computing platform we have co-developed for exploration and development together with Huawei. This is a shared and scalable AI compute platform designed around four key factors: only data, algorithm, computing power, and the scenarios. Data processing, machine learning model launches, and the inference applications are all hosted in this one-stop AI development environment. The development and deployment of this platform provides business innovation with intelligent drivers and an ecosystem. It enables knowledge to be preserved, inherited, and shared. Through a cognitive computing platform, a knowledge graph covering all functions of development and exploration is taking shape. This is a self-improving and organically growing project. The seed of knowledge is burgeoning and gathering the power of more knowledge over time. 10, 20, 30 years later, it will definitely grow into a towering tree nourished by intelligence and further into a forest of knowledge, revolutionizing oil exploration and development with technology. Next, I would like to give you two examples on applications which were touched upon by Mr. Zheng. I would like to give you further information. Oil exploration involves extremely complex science. A critical step is well logging, whereby in geophysics, we, in the course of drilling, use all kinds of ways and instruments and analyze resistivity, natural potential, acoustic velocity, and many other data, and identify oil and gas reservoirs. Experts matter, so we need a team of experts to take the lead in a completed job. In Daqing oil field, by a cognitive computing platform, the people there applied machine learning to 900 wells, collected data about logging, realized the intelligent recognition of oil, gas, water horizon, shortened the assessment time by 70%, and accuracy reaching the expert level. I believe that with more practices, the accuracy will be even higher as a result of learning. By using knowledge graph, professional threshold was lowered, expertise inherited, and efficiency remarkably improved. In a second case, which is about oil and gas production, the use of IoT and machine learning has allowed oil fields to receive quantitative diagnosis and remote real-time online management. So in the traditional oil fields, the machines need to be attended manually. Now, by intelligent recognition of irregularities, we have improved the accuracy of such recognition above 90%, and the oil field management operated from post-accident diagnosis to pre-accident alerts. Maintenance cost went down by 20%. Eight oil fields in Qinghai province became unattended. You know, the area is in a very barren piece of desert, and the center of gravity for management has been relocated from the desert to the Dongsheng and plains. More than 700 people in the management were relocated, and 800 field workers were reassigned. This has reduced the production cost and improved the sophistication of oilfield management. Finally, I would like to note that PetroChina has completed the planning and designing of the intelligent oil fields and explored AI in 22 selected scenarios in exploration and development. The seeds of intelligent applications are budding and will soon grow into towering trees. It is my conviction that in the near future, in partnership with Huawei, CNPC or PetroChina will constantly improve its cognitive computing platform and upgrade its oil exploration and development business. Thank you.
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Zheng Li1:51:43
Thank you, Professor Gao. Professor Gao's presentation is very enlightening. We also hope that our Cloud Industrial Intelligent Twins will help more companies to accelerate their intelligent upgrading process. Huawei Cloud hopes that we can work together with a growing number of companies to cross the chasm of AI commercialization, so that AI can really benefit all sectors and industries and bring new commercial success to our partners. A growing number of our customers are turning to Huawei. In the beginning of this year, after one day's brainstorming, we were thinking about our slogan, that is, Intelligent Future. With that, I announce my presentation is concluded. Thank you.
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Host1:52:44
Thank you, Mr. Zheng, for your expertise on Huawei Cloud AI for industries. At the same time, many thanks to all of our speakers for their inspiring speeches.