On November 9, 2017, Wang Jian, chairman of Alibaba Group’s technical Committee, published an article on People’s Daily about his thinking and outlook on “urban brain” : “In the future, data resources will be more important than land resources in urban development.”
At the 2017 Hangzhou Computing Conference, Wang Jian, chairman of Alibaba Group technology Committee, introduced that urban brain will become a necessary infrastructure for cities in the future.
In the past two years, due to the popularity of artificial intelligence, some media even wrote the title of “The end of the Internet”. In fact, it is precisely because the development of the Internet precipitated massive data, cloud computing provides powerful computing power, so that artificial intelligence, which is not a young discipline, has once again encountered a historic development opportunity. This view of the media also reflects another confusion behind the noise of artificial intelligence. Without the ai of the Internet, it’s hard to tell where it’s going.
When artificial intelligence was just proposed in the 1950s, due to the great limitations of the computing capacity of machines and other aspects, we have been trying to make machines imitate human intelligence. The famous Turing Test is also about how machines simulate human intelligence in essence. However, the development of the Internet and computing technology to today, in addition to the simulation of human intelligence, we have ushered in a huge development opportunity, with the interconnection of everything and massive data, can use the computing power of machines to solve problems that can not be solved by human intelligence alone. Just as human beings have overcome their physical inadequacy with mechanical devices with steel and electric motors. In this sense, the problem of artificial intelligence that many people talk about today is more accurately defined by the term machine intelligence.
Today, the sustainable development of cities around the world faces many difficulties. Without further breakthrough technological innovation, we will face even greater challenges. These challenges also present a rare opportunity to use machine intelligence based on the Internet, data and computing to solve many important problems in urban development, such as traffic governance, which countries have failed to solve. While solving these important problems, it is also an opportunity for a new generation of technologies such as machine intelligence to mature and intelligent industries to rise. That’s why I put my heart into promoting the city brain.
In the past 20 years, China has continued to invest in urban informatization construction. In particular, the public security and traffic police departments have always taken the lead and accumulated rich data resources for cities. But without the help of machine intelligence, the traffic camera videos generated in a city in one day could be watched in more than 100 years by people. Most of these valuable data have been silently deleted before they have played a role. The city of Hangzhou unveiled the world’s first urban brain initiative at the Cloud Computing Conference last October. I had a feeling at the meeting that the furthest distance in the world is not from the South Pole to the North Pole, but from the traffic light to the traffic camera. They are on the same pole, but they have never been connected by data. What the camera sees will never become the action of the traffic light. If the data is not available, the traffic is not smooth, which not only wastes the data resources of the city, but also increases the cost of urban operation and development.
What the city brain needs to do is to take the Internet as the infrastructure and make use of rich urban data resources to make real-time analysis of the overall situation of the city. Use urban data resources to effectively allocate public resources, constantly improve social governance, and promote urban sustainable development. In the future, data resources will be more important than land resources in urban development, which is the basic thinking of the urban brain.
In Hangzhou, the city brain extracted real-time traffic flow from video from city cameras, and for the first time, the city’s traffic lights were able to optimize time allocation at intersections and improve traffic efficiency based on real-time traffic flow. Relying on the amazing computer vision analysis ability, using every traffic camera to carry out real-time traffic physical examination on the road, just like a traffic police patrol on the road all year round.
On the Cloud Computing Conference in October this year, Hangzhou City Brain handed over the annual answer of using data resources to govern the city: 128 signal junctions connected with traffic data reduced the passage time in the pilot area by 15.3%. In the main urban areas, the urban brain alarms more than 500 times a day, with an accuracy rate of 92%, greatly improving the directivity of law enforcement. At present, hangzhou traffic police detachment has carried out traffic light optimization in the main urban area through the urban brain, and provided immediate police response decisions.
Xiaoshan district has also innovatively realized the priority dispatch of 120 ambulances and other special vehicles. Once the first aid point receives a call, the city brain will automatically allocate the signal lights along the line according to the traffic flow data, so as to instantly customize a green life line for the ambulance, and reduce the impact on other traffic. The actual results showed that the time for ambulances to arrive at the scene was reduced by nearly half.
Traffic governance is just the starting point. More importantly, data begins to generate value for society and solve urban development problems that cannot be solved by human brains today. Just as it would have been difficult to develop twentieth-century cities without the invention of mechanical devices, the urban brain will bring three important breakthroughs in urban development:
First, the breakthrough of urban governance model. With the urban data of social structure, social environment, social activities and other aspects as resources, we need manpower from data and service ability from data, so as to solve prominent problems in urban governance and achieve innovative and humanized governance model.
Second, the breakthrough of urban service mode. Urban brain is a very important material basis for the government to serve people’s livelihood, and it can serve enterprises and individuals more accurately. Urban public services, such as transportation, will enter an era of precise and efficient services, eliminating the waste of public resources.
Third, breakthroughs in urban industrial development. Open urban data resources are very important basic resources to promote the upgrading and transformation of traditional industries and the development of innovative industries, just like petroleum and semiconductor materials to drive industrial development.
Suzhou, for example, has recently made it clear that it is necessary to improve the intelligent level of urban management by focusing on traffic governance under the overall framework of urban brain. The public security authorities will work with transportation, city appearance and municipal management, tourism, rail transit and other departments to carry out pilot projects to gather massive data from various departments into the city’s brain and use large-scale computing power and machine intelligence to help cities operate efficiently and safely. As the urban brain system expands to all areas of social governance, Suzhou will have the opportunity to become a model of urban, social and industrial governance using data resources.
Urban brain is not only technological innovation, but also institutional innovation, accelerating the concept change from closed data to open data. By opening up the neural network of the city, the whole city can be analyzed and analyzed in real time, and the data can help the city think, make decisions and operate.
Today, no city in the world considers an urban brain a “necessity.” The urban brain could first appear in China, thanks to the country’s developed Internet infrastructure. Today, while people in China pay for baked sweet potatoes with their cell phones, most americans still pay their utility bills with checks. This seemingly small difference makes China uniquely competitive. Our urban data resources will accumulate faster than any other country in the world, which gives us an important opportunity to solve urban development problems with a more advanced approach than developed countries.
Urban brain is not only of great significance to China’s urban development, but also provides a large-scale exploration scene for China’s scientific and technological innovation. The moon landings of the 1960s led to important innovations in communications and bioengineering. Today, the Internet has become an infrastructure in China, and we have unprecedented computing power and data resources. Urban brain will not only benefit people, but also become the most important research platform for machine intelligence in the next 10 years, like the moon landing. Alibaba pioneered cloud computing a decade ago as a way to give young Chinese the computing power of multinational giants in global competition. Today, urban brains will give China a first mover advantage in the coming global intelligence era.
Every technological revolution will push forward urban civilization. In the age of the steam engine, the city was marked by roads; In the age of electric power, the development of cities is to lay power grids. We live in the Internet age, data has become an important resource, and cities need to build a data brain to promote civilization once again. Just as the subway was first built in London 160 years ago, and the power grid was first built in Manhattan 135 years ago, the urban brain will become a brand new urban infrastructure, an important exploration and contribution that China should make to the world.
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