F(X) Team of Ali Tao Department – Zhen Zi
It is difficult to review all the changes in technology development in one article, so this article attempts to provide a full summary with a personal focus. Industry development is the first driving force of technology. Industry perspective can well penetrate the phenomenon of technology development and touch the essence. Over the past year, technology has also changed dramatically, driven by the epidemic, international conflicts and the development of the digital era. Here are some thoughts on how these changes affect us and how to respond from an industry perspective.
Under the outbreak
Regression of city
The lockdown of countries and cities has been a valuable lesson that mankind has paid for with blood and blood since the beginning of the black Death and the pandemic. With the development of social science and technology, these anti-epidemic measures have been integrated with more technologies to deal with the side effects while the principle remains unchanged.
Digital resistance to disease
COVID-19 health vouchers, Alipay health code, public transport control, urban brain and human movement trajectory control… Together constitute the transmission source control system. It started from China to promote the global mobile APP control experience and successfully completed its mission. However, concerns about social rights and privacy violations emerge one after another, which also constitute the public’s fear of Leviathan. In the face of the epidemic, there is no winner. Europe chooses freedom at the expense of life, while totalitarian countries choose life at the expense of part of freedom. For technicians, the Damocles sword of technical morality requires more accountability and introspection.
telecommuting
The automated participation of 3D avatars around the creation of games will eventually die. And around the core of remote collaborative office “office”, will be born more new technologies, background replacement is only the tip of the iceberg, similar to Microsoft HoloLens remote assistance, telemedicine… The successful experience in professional fields will be an important driving force for the development of telecommuting.
Life electricity
As someone who has experienced the epidemic, the first question brought by the lockdown is: how to solve the problem of food, clothing, housing, transportation? In the early days of the epidemic, there was a rush for masks, and the lack of masks made shopping for food the first problem. The rush to buy local produce from supermarkets is the second problem. Long-term confinement at home, unable to buy Switch health ring adventure, has become the third problem of entertainment. Community volunteers, grid management and e-commerce have become the core means to solve life problems. It must be admitted that no one is fully prepared in the face of a sudden epidemic. Some problems and disadvantages are normal. But what about when these disadvantages and problems happen to us? In the post-epidemic era, we need to reflect on what we have changed as a technologist. What has improved? Just as we think about anomalies and boundary values in software engineering, we need to consider social anomalies and boundary values when providing technical solutions to avoid scrambling when social problems occur. If input and value are challenged, as a technical person, flexibility and scalability should at least be designed and reserved in advance.
The remote education
What about children’s education after work and life? The scene of education is greater than the scene of work, because edutainment, Montessori education… It has become the mainstream requirement for parents to pursue the quality of education. How does technology provide interactive capabilities? How does technology provide a good experience? How does technology enable children to be immersive? AR/VR/MR opens up a lot of possibilities and imagination.
HTTP3/QUIC
How to use HTTP3/QUIC to solve the TCP/IP header blocking problem, how to let children see the screen faster, how to distribute load guide children waiting while part of the interactive or display ability? Can be a good solution to the child’s patience problem. Consider: Facebook’s practice in deploying QUIC.
Motion capture
ARKit not only measures 3D space, detects surfaces and places virtual elements, but also adds motion-capture capabilities. Motion capture allows kids to be more immersive and interact more realistically with the digital world. In particular, hardware upgrades can better accomplish this thing: neural network computing acceleration chips, radar, multi-camera machine vision… .
Audio and video compression
Whether remote working or remote education, just like the traditional video website, bandwidth is a topic that can not be bypassed. The previous compression technology is based on information theory, through the algorithm to restore the missing information (packet loss and other problems). Nowadays, with the support of super resolution technology, the bandwidth problem can be well solved. The solution idea is consistent with that in previous programming fields, “time for space” and “space for time”. In scenarios requiring space, such as data transmission, “time for space” computing is used instead of storage, and in scenarios requiring time, such as cache, “space for time” storage is used instead of computing.
Cloud computing
The epidemic has blocked the way for people to provide services. “Door-to-door service” is gradually programming “cloud service”. A wave of new market of cloud-based SaaS software has emerged, and many people are engaged in innovation and entrepreneurship in 2B fields. In the process of building SaaS, WebServices once again come from behind the scenes with the help of OAM (Open Application Model).
Limited application, separation of concerns between application and platform capabilities, and out-of-the-box proven by Go are the number one promotional forces that almost make up the main features of OAM.
International conflicts
There are two different versions of the same story: 1. Due to the investment of a large amount of RESEARCH and development costs, personnel training, technical discipline construction… Therefore, to vigorously protect intellectual property rights, profits must be guaranteed to promote capital investment in new technology research; 2. Due to lack of development due to historical reasons, it has been exploited by high profits for a long time. Therefore, to vigorously develop its own technology, we must ensure that everyone can enjoy the dividends brought by technological development and contribute to the universal benefits of technology. There is nothing wrong with either version, but an impartial third party arbiter is missing. Otherwise, there is no end to the arguments. However, one can not ignore the fact that capitalists always take new technology investment as a threat, brandishing the big stick of intellectual property protection, beating the technology people who do not live up to their standards. Therefore, the gentleman to self-improvement, how to deal with is a problem.
Chip technology lockdown
As we all know, chip is the cornerstone of the rapid development of modern and modern industrial industry, the Internet of everything has been in the daily life of home appliances, mobile phones, headphones… And so on, the penetration of the more in-depth and comprehensive. However, chip technology from EDA, photolithography, packaging to testing, raw material wafer… Constitute a huge complex and clearly divided industry. No matter how the media praised our research results, the so-called dream of “catching up with the UK and the US” in 10 to 15 years is probably just a dream. There are too many basic disciplines to conquer, and too much material science and technology to innovate and invent.
However, with the popularization of artificial intelligence applications, general chips are gradually divided into special chips: NPU, DSP, CPLD, FPGA, Intel DPDK… Are replacing general-purpose computing chips in specific areas, fundamentally changing the whole business of software development.
The “human-computer collaborative approach to programming” creates an opportunity to develop software on dedicated chips, opening up pathways blocked by general-purpose computing chips. The concept of human-computer collaborative programming comes from the deep thinking of the front end intelligence. The scope of responsibility for the whole front-end has expanded with the advent of Node FaaS, RN, Weex, and more.
For the front end, entering the intelligent field requires learning: machine learning, Python, TF and other machine learning frameworks, parallelization and computation acceleration…… And so on technology, the threshold is very high. In the practice of front end intelligence of IMGCook.com, Alibaba Front End Committee precipitates and opens source: Pipcook to lower the threshold of front end intelligence.
At the same time, Boa provides rich Python technology ecological reuse capabilities, so that the front-end can make reliable machine learning.
Pipcook also optimizes the process while ensuring that the front end can develop solid machine learning projects. There’s a lot of support for learning and experimentation with Jupiter Notebook ideas, and Pipboard and support for Corlab.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are inseparable from data processing. Whether organizing training samples or processing logs, massive data need to be acquired, organized, cleaned, analyzed… And other work. DataCook incorporates the danfo.js open source project, leveraging Tensorflow’s powerful TFData processing capabilities and hardware acceleration capabilities to enable the front-end to easily process massive amounts of data.
Software technology lockdown
Core technology research
Core technology research ≠ repetitive wheel!! Core technology self-research should first be delimit within the scope of commercial and closed source software, because open source software belongs to the community, everyone can follow the open source agreement to keep away from patent trolls and technology bottlenecks, to put it bluntly: mutual containment.
Secondly, for the operating system, drivers, algorithm libraries… These underlying techniques, which are frequently used, also require adequate risk recognition and assessment. Matlab is a typical example. Today, a large number of algorithms are written with Matlab, a large number of engineering technology and automation control technology rely on Matlab, a large number of chemical, biological and other scientific research rely on Matlab. The technical blockade of Matlab can be described as “precision attack”. At the same time of the social cost of a large number of human, material and financial resources for migration, as a technical person, he or she should be able to fully assess the technical risks of his or her own enterprise, identify these points that may be “targeted attack”, look for open source technology and “spare tire” in advance, and even make wheels by himself when necessary.
Finally, focus on frames, scaffolding, and tools. With the development of engineering technology, technical work has been hijacked by more and more frames, scaffolding and tools, once these frames, scaffolding and tools fail, the existing software engineering system will have a huge impact.
Open source application technology
In addition, some allow commercial free use of open source code is not literally free, such as 2.0 under the GPL (choosealicense.com/licenses/gp…). If your code uses his code, your code must be open source under the GPL.
Is made Clear in addition, there are still some open source licenses are not awarded the right to use the patent, for example the BSD – 3 – Clause – the Clear (choosealicense.com/licenses/bs…). This code is potentially risky to introduce into business code. According to the front-end scenario, a License whitelist has been combed. Your project is safe if it relies on the following open source modules distributed under the following protocols:
- MIT
- Zlib
- ISC
- WTFPL
- Unlicense
- Apache-1.1
- Apache-2.0
- BSD-2-Clause
- BSD-3-Clause
Besides knowing the open source agreement, how to break through the technology blockade with open source in the future? From the perspective of technology blockade: First, the “stuck” party needs to use the open source technology provided by us, and the “universality” can ensure that the open source technology penetrates into the business of the other party from all dimensions. Secondly, either from the functional level, or from the technical level, to design a certain dependence, to avoid being replaced or removed painless; Finally, to be advanced, to make people have to use, can not use, not use will bring obvious huge costs and costs.
The digital age
The environment and the people in it together make up the world. In terms of environment, digital twin technology maps the physical world to the digital world, making it easy for us to interact across time and space, such as Alipay gas meter reading. AR and other technologies map the digital world to the physical world, facilitating our digital understanding of the physical world (HoloLens repairs cars) and digital use (AR games, AR house viewing). The human aspect is also two-way. First, the physical world provides digital credentials (electronic id cards). Second, the digital world provides physical simulation (3D avatars). When technology reaches a certain stage, we will no longer be able to distinguish between the physical world and the digital world, calling it “the world”.
The environment
Digital twin digitized the physical city. With the help of AI’s control of signal lights and road conditions, the travel time was reduced by 15.3% and the travel time of viaduct was saved by 4.6 minutes. With the support of WebGPU technology, it provides good 3D rendering capability on the Web technology with super cross-platform capability. Acceleration of computing power through WASM technology and AI acceleration capability provided by WebNN technology (Pipcook is the standard maker of WebNN) together form the basis of digital twinnings, resulting in a large number of life and industrial application scenarios.
Physics engine:
Industrial control automation:
Energy management automation:
people
Digital certificates
In 2016, Christopher Allen, a core contributor to SSL/TLS, presented a set of 10 principles that underpin a new digital identity and a way to achieve it: the path to autonomous identity. Autonomous identity, also known as decentralized identity, is a “lifelong transferable identity of any person, organization or thing that is independent of any centralized authority and can never be taken away,” according to trust standards based on the IP protocol stack.
Decentralized identity is heating up and becoming possible. We’re seeing applications for privacy: customer health apps, government healthcare infrastructure, and corporate legal identities. If you want to quickly apply decentralized identity, you can evaluate open source software such as Sovrin Network, Hy-Perledger Aries, and Indy, as well as the W3C standard for decentralized identity and verifiable credentials.
3D avatars
According to scientists, human expressions convey many times as much information as words do. Realistic portrait generation, the accurate capture of facial details, has become possible, making your image in the digital world more realistic and vivid.
It can also be semantically segmented, separating parts of the physical world.
Another object detection, to find the parts of the physical world that need to be replaced by digital images.
And finally, of course, sound.
Summary and Outlook
The impact of COVID-19, international conflicts and the advent of the digital era have brought both great technological challenges and great opportunities. Buffett said: I am fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. In fact, it is the same truth, to see the opportunity under the crisis, insight into the crisis in the opportunity, is an excellent technical people need to master the important skills.
AI and machine learning throughout this article are also the parts I pay most attention to and am most optimistic about. On the road of technological growth, we have always moved from simple problem solving to complex and systematic problem solving. Our technical capability also evolves from technology point to technology surface and technology system. However, in the face of AI and machine learning, which is a powerful technical ability, deterministic programming in the past seems so weak that the ability of indetermination-oriented programming is needed to deal with the changing environment, people and the complex data generated by the interaction between environment and people. We expect Pipcook to help us quickly enter the era of AI and machine learning, deal with all kinds of uncertainty and complexity problems, embed agents in our technology and engineering, and put simple if… Else, the select… Case becomes AI prediction and decision making, redefining the way we program with “human-machine collaboration.”
