To promote AI and introduce exceptional Taiwan AI solutions providers to the international stage, Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau (IDB) and Institute for Information Industry (III) recently held a webinar, “Result-focused AI: Examples from the Field.” asmag.com was glad to be a co-organizer. The event had its successful run in the afternoon of June 30.

The organizer, IDB, is committed to leading Taiwan’s industrial innovation, upgrade and transformation, with the goal of helping industrial players improve productivity and international competitiveness. With AI becoming a key trend, IDB seeks to help industries transform and overcome their challenges and pain points with AI. To achieve that, IDB introduced a development model that links industry associations and identifies companies with AI technology to explore fields and industries in need of AI applications.

Such an approach has resulted in many successful Taiwan companies specializing in AI. This is the primary reason for IDB holding the webinar, which offers a platform for noteworthy Taiwanese companies to share their solutions and use cases to the rest of the world, including Asia where AI has huge growth potential.

Result-focused AI discussion

The webinar was aimed at highlighting “result-focused AI,” seeking to explore real use cases that are beneficial to end users in certain sectors, including security, smart city and smart transportation. The program featured three speakers with extensive experience in the AI field. They were Patrick Lim, Director of Group Strategy at Ademco Security Group; Steve Hu, Product Manager at Merit LILIN; and Jonny Wu, Director of Imaging System Business Unit at Ability Enterprise.

In his keynote message, Ademco’s Lim pointed to video surveillance as a key driving force of AI in security, which can be well-served by AI detecting suspicious individuals or activities with great accuracy. In his view, AI will see continued growth down the road, achieve overall maturity in handling data privacy laws and will be purpose-built and packaged for ease of deployment.

Lim also shared an example of how AI has helped one of their financial customers solve certain operational and security challenges. “In the past access control was very predictable, with the issuance of cards and all. The company wanted to go contactless yet still manage thousands of staff. So we used a facial recognition system that was able to track if the person was at the right place at the time. Beyond access, we are also working toward a scenario whereby abnormal activities are detected, for example someone loitering in the lift lobby,” Lim said.

Hu of LILIN discussed their AI technology called Aida and shared real-life use cases. Especially in traffic enforcement, the AI can detect illegal right turns, illegal left turns, run on red light and other violations, and notify authorities accordingly. Meanwhile, the company has caught up with the edge AI trend and will roll out NDAA-compliant edge AI cameras supporting Ambarella SoCs, built-in AI GPUs and VPUs and concurrent 4 Yolo v3 models for AI.

“Edge AI will set the trend for next two to three years. Right now we rely on servers with big graphics cards for AI processing. Since LILIN released edge AI cameras, I think this kind of requirement will become less and less. I believe edge will be the future,” Hu said.Related: LILIN seizes AI trend in security and IoT to deliver cutting-edge solutions

Wu of Ability focused his presentation on the applications of AI cameras, of which Ability is a leading manufacturer. “You may ask what’s the benefit of edge AI cameras. The first one is real-time data processing. You don’t have to upload to the cloud or server to run AI, and in the process you can save a lot of labor and operating cost. Edge AI also provides privacy to users. Third, edge AI can help reduce bandwidth consumption, providing only metadata to the cloud,” Wu said.

Use cases are quite diverse. Ability’s smart city surveillance project in Latin America, which leverages an edge-cloud surveillance ecosystem to fight crime, has resulted in a crime rate reduction of 40 percent. In transportation, Ability’s AI cameras integrate with edge servers that transmit metadata to the cloud, which then controls traffic signals based on the traffic condition that the camera sees. In electric vehicle charging station management, the AI camera identifies an EV based on its plate and guides it to the charging station space; fuel-based vehicles approaching the space will be warned.Related: Ability puts intelligence on the edge, touts AI potential in Asia 

The event concluded with the three speakers sharing their views and use cases on AI, the influence of which will only grow in the near future. It is expected, then, that under the AI trend, more companies will put in efforts into AI research and development and achieve success in Asia and other parts of the world.