Boonray Technology and Microsoft jointly appeared at the second China International Import Expo

The second China International Import Expo (CIIE) will be held in Shanghai from November 5th to 10th. At this year's CIIE, Microsoft will exhibit in the "Technology and Life" area. Under the three themes of AI + Organization Transformation, AI + Innovation, and AI + Beautiful Society, the company will showcase a range of advanced technologies, products, and solutions, centered around Microsoft AI. Through a rich array of practical applications and implementation scenarios, the company will demonstrate how Microsoft is collaborating with Chinese businesses, developers, and partners to seize opportunities in digital transformation, unleash innovative wisdom, and build a better future, in line with Microsoft's mission of "empowering every person and every organization to achieve more."

AI + Organization Transformation Zone: Empowering Business Transformation and Seizing Innovation Opportunities

Leveraging its world-leading Microsoft intelligent cloud services and AI technologies, Microsoft is actively helping businesses and organizations across industries worldwide seize innovative opportunities in their digital transformation. In the AI + Organization Transformation Zone, Microsoft showcased application scenarios where AI is helping businesses and organizations improve productivity and optimize business processes, as well as innovative solutions for vertical industries such as logistics and retail.

At the 2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Microsoft officially announced the launch of the Microsoft AI Business School program in Greater China. This program combines global offline interactive learning with online courses. The program has formed strategic partnerships with three renowned business schools: Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management, CEIBS, and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The program aims to provide a comprehensive AI business curriculum for future business leaders, innovative companies, and executives, focusing on AI strategy development, culture building, and technology deployment. The curriculum addresses three key topics of concern to contemporary AI leaders: defining AI strategy, embracing an AI culture, and cultivating responsible and reliable AI.

Microsoft Research Asia has collaborated with Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL), an international container shipping and logistics company, to develop an AI-powered logistics scheduling solution. Traditionally, the uneven import and export trade between regions results in significant variations in the demand for empty containers across ports. Efficiently dispatching empty containers between ports is a crucial aspect of shipping operations. Microsoft Research Asia customized a collaborative reinforcement learning framework for OOCL to optimize the scheduling of shipping resources. This intelligent logistics solution reduces route optimization time from 1-3 hours to milliseconds, and is expected to save OOCL $10 million in operating costs annually.

Microsoft 365 integrates Office 365, Windows 10, and the Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite to create an intelligent workplace, enabling enterprises to achieve a modern workplace. This includes applications for daily work, such as AI-powered applications for business data analysis, language communication, professional document creation, and information collection and organization. It also includes solutions for intelligent communication and collaboration. Through Microsoft Teams, employees can use speech-to-text to enable "live captioning." During video conferences, users can blur or replace their backgrounds. In Microsoft Teams video conferencing, users can transform whiteboard content into a digital virtual whiteboard, eliminating human obstruction. Enterprises and organizations can also interact with participants via video. All of this is achieved within an intelligent, secure, and attack-resistant network environment.

In this area, Microsoft will also showcase how Dynamics 365 Guides empowers employees to learn through practice. As a new mixed reality application, Dynamics 365 Guides guides employees through the tools and components they need to understand and use in real-world work scenarios, enhancing the learning process. By creating interactive content, attaching photos and videos, importing 3D models, and customizing training, users can transform institutional knowledge into reusable learning tools. This application helps reduce downtime and improve the efficiency of mission-critical equipment and processes.

Based on the Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, Microsoft and Yum! Software have collaborated to create the E3+ enterprise middleware solution. As a provider of omnichannel digital retail solutions with nearly two decades of experience, Yum! Software has extensive experience and practical experience in the retail sector. The E3+ enterprise middleware solution showcased is specifically targeted at large-scale enterprises seeking to seize industry leadership through transformation and change, providing them with a future-proof, iterative, and sustainable technology and business foundation platform. Leveraging Microsoft's intelligent cloud, enterprises can achieve flexible capacity expansion and easily implement multi-site backup, enabling them to build and run highly available applications without having to focus on infrastructure.

iLabService's INTELAB is a smart laboratory cloud solution that integrates IoT, machine learning, and automation technologies. Built on Microsoft Azure, this highly compatible and scalable solution helps users quickly and easily digitally connect laboratory equipment, environments, materials, and personnel, enabling users to gain real-time insights into laboratory conditions. By analyzing and leveraging collected multi-dimensional data, users can operate and manage their laboratories more intelligently and efficiently.

As one of the first companies to join Microsoft's AI and IoT labs, Boonray Technology showcased its drone-based river inspection solution at the exhibition. In the past, many teams working to control water pollution faced numerous challenges associated with traditional manual operations, such as the scattered distribution of rivers, significant labor consumption, low inspection efficiency, and difficulty locating sewage outlets. The drone-based river inspection solution enables fully automated river patrols, data collection, and analysis. Leveraging services such as IoT Hub, Event Hub, and Cosmos DB on Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, the system can easily remotely manage and control drones and identify and analyze real-time footage. If foreign objects such as trash are detected in the river, automated collection vessels can be dispatched for recovery. This solution enables efficient, contactless river inspections, reducing the need for extensive manpower during remediation and enhancing the accuracy and safety of inspections. Ultimately, it automates, informs, and visualizes the entire water quality monitoring process, facilitating subsequent targeted water quality remediation and long-term monitoring.

AI+ Innovation Zone: Driving Innovation in the Tech Industry

In the field of artificial intelligence, Microsoft is committed to making AI accessible to everyone, providing innovative platforms and technical tools for businesses, developers, and partners to empower innovation within the ecosystem and the entire tech industry.

Microsoft Translator, an AI-powered translation service, aims to eliminate language barriers in face-to-face communication, enabling users around the world to easily and effectively communicate and collaborate. Currently, Microsoft Translator easily provides real-time translation between text in over 60 languages and voice in over 10 languages. The Microsoft Translator API can be integrated into any website or application, on any device, and on any operating system, helping thousands of businesses worldwide improve application and workflow efficiency, reduce costs, and communicate more effectively with customers worldwide. The Presentation Translator plug-in, designed for PowerPoint, displays translated subtitles in multiple languages in real time across different clients during a slideshow, and easily saves both the real-time subtitles and the translation results.

Microsoft XiaoIce, now in its seventh generation, is one of the world's most cross-domain AI systems. It has reached 660 million online users, 450 million third-party smart devices, and 900 million content viewers in multiple countries. Despite a significant expansion in interactive scenarios, the average conversational turn per session (CPS) between Microsoft XiaoIce and users remains at 23. The first generation of the Avatar Framework, recently released by Microsoft XiaoIce for partners, is derived from the Microsoft XiaoIce framework and makes it easy to build AI assistants, social conversational bots, AI content creation, and IP characters with comprehensive emotional computing capabilities. As a branch of this framework, the Microsoft XiaoIce exhibition showcased XiaoIce's achievements in AI creation in various forms, including paintings in various styles, audiobooks designed specifically for children, and singing that replicates human breath levels and vocal transitions. As a pioneer in AI creation, Microsoft advocates using AI technology to address the supply and demand imbalance of highly customized content. Microsoft currently possesses world-leading core technologies in text, audio, and visual creation, and has released actual online products. Among them, the AI textile and apparel fabric design platform jointly launched with the China National Textile and Apparel Council has entered production, with products from brands such as SELECTED, Wanshili, and Yiwen now available for sale. "XiaoIce Studio" boasts a rich collection of models, including multiple voice models covering various singing techniques and various painting models. These production lines enable the production and distribution of content with stable quality, extremely low cost, and high concurrency, without human intervention. Some production lines have now achieved industrialization.

The Azure Kinect DK smart terminal device is equipped with multiple industry-leading AI sensors to perceive and understand the world. By leveraging advanced AI technology, the device integrates multiple sensors, including 3D spatial recognition, voice recognition, and a high-definition camera, into a single device. A 1-megapixel Time-of-Flight (ToF) depth camera captures the surrounding environment in near real time; a 12-megapixel HD camera provides a color image stream paired with depth data. A 3D accelerometer and 3D gyroscope (IMU) provide directional and spatial tracking capabilities. External synchronization pins enable easy synchronization of multiple Kinect sensor streams. When combined with Azure Cognitive Services, advanced computer vision and speech models can be developed, providing businesses with more intelligent device solutions.

HoloLens is Microsoft's first mixed reality device, the company's next-generation intelligent device designed for the third wave of computing. When people wear HoloLens, using mixed reality technology, they can see a fusion of virtual and real worlds, revolutionizing how we perceive the world. Currently, HoloLens is primarily used in the commercial market, particularly in manufacturing, automotive, healthcare, and construction.

Azure Sphere is a highly secure, end-to-end solution for IoT devices, designed to elevate security across the entire IoT industry. Through the collaborative efforts of certified microcontrollers, operating systems, and security services, it provides comprehensive security protection for edge devices in the home, medical, and industrial sectors. The solution's first element is a new secure MCU, provided by Microsoft's semiconductor partners. All Sphere MCUs incorporate Microsoft's security IP. The second element is a secure operating system, purpose-built for IoT devices, integrating the best of Microsoft and open source software (OSS) technologies, making it a trusted platform for a new IoT experience. The third element is the Azure Sphere cloud service, which ensures that every IoT device receives continuous security services, continuous software updates, and ongoing detection of potential security threats across the entire ecosystem. This ensures that connections and communications between devices and the cloud are secure and reliable, based on certificate-based authentication.

AI + A Better Society: Empowering Social Development and Talent Education, AI Brings More Possibilities

In this themed area, Microsoft showcased a series of AI technologies already in use in our lives today, AI-powered public welfare projects, and the new possibilities that AI can bring to talent education in the new era.

The K12 AI Visual Programming Platform is an AI programming platform designed specifically for youth programming education. Based on an online graphical programming platform, it incorporates Microsoft AI technology features, incorporates computational thinking and practical application, and offers a curriculum tailored to specific teaching scenarios, offering low-threshold visual programming instruction and hands-on experiments. The K12 AI Visual Programming Platform course is designed for primary and secondary school students, offering a systematic curriculum covering all age groups. It helps students better understand AI and achieve innovative programming through hands-on, immersive learning experiences. The course incorporates AI technologies, including voice, language, vision, and search, into the curriculum, progressing from basic to advanced, combining theory with practical application, allowing students to master and apply the AI programming platform from the ground up.

STEAM is a cross-disciplinary curriculum within Microsoft Innovation Schools. Students will be introduced to technologies such as AI, big data, and the Internet of Things through this experience. The course strives to cultivate students' well-rounded interests and comprehensive qualities across various fields. By breaking down subject boundaries and prioritizing interactive and hands-on learning, the course aims to help students develop comprehensive skills from the very beginning.

At the exhibition, Microsoft also showcased its AI philanthropy efforts. Microsoft has always advocated using artificial intelligence technology to empower the world, improve social welfare, promote sustainable development of people and nature, and enhance human capabilities.