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Four years ago, organizers created the international AI City Challenge to drive development Artificial intelligence for real scenarios like counting cars traveling at intersections or detecting accidents on highways.
In the early years, teams representing American companies or universities took first places in the competition. Last year, Chinese companies won three of the four competitions.
Last week, China’s tech giants Alibaba and Baidu He led the AI City Challenge, beating competitors from nearly 40 nations. Chinese companies or universities took first and second place in all five categories. TikTok The founder of ByteDance took second place in the competition to identify car accidents or parked vehicles from highway video feeds.
The results reflect the Chinese government’s investment in smart cities. Hundreds of Chinese cities have pilot programs and, according to some estimates, China has half of the world’s smart cities. Spread the edge using computers, cameras and sensors 5G wireless connections are expected to accelerate the use of smart city and surveillance technology.
The technology featured in these competitions may be useful for urban planners, but it can also facilitate invasive surveillance. Counting the number of cars on the road helps engineers understand the resources needed to help citizens with roads and bridges, but tracking a vehicle in multiple live camera streams is a powerful way to watch. One of the AI City Challenge contest asked participants to identify their cars in video feeds; for the first time this year, the descriptions were made in plain language, such as “a blue Jeep goes straight down a winding road behind a red truck.”
The competition comes at a time of greater technological nationalism and US tension China, and growing concern about the powers of AI. In 2019, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said China is “the main driver of AI surveillance around the world”. The group said China and the US are the two main exporters of the technology. Last month, the Biden administration expanded the blacklist initiated by the Trump administration to nearly 60 Chinese companies that were banned from receiving investment from U.S. financiers. It has also been approved by the U.S. Senate in recent weeks Competition and Innovation Act, offering billions of investments to achieve chip, AI and supply chain reliability. It also calls for investment in smart cities, including expanding smart city cooperation with Southeast Asian nations (excluding China).
China’s dominance in the challenge of smart cities can come with an asterisk. U.S. government official John Garofolo, who is participating in the competition, says he has noticed fewer U.S. teams this year. Organizers say they do not track participants by country.
Stan Caldwell is the executive director of Mobility21 at Carnegie Mellon University, a project to help develop smart cities in Pittsburgh. Caldwell deplores China’s investment twice as much The U.S. as a part of GDP in research and development, which calls for the keys to remaining competitive in emerging technology areas.
He says U.S. AI researchers can compete for government grants, such as the National Science Foundation’s Civic Innovation Challenge or the Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. According to a report released last month, the city of Columbus (Ohio) was given a $ 50 million grant. never deliver with the promise of building a smart city of the future.
“We want to develop technologies because we want to improve safety and efficiency and sustainability. But, selfishly, we also want to develop this technology here and improve our economy, ”says Caldwell.
Spokesmen for Alibaba and Baidu have been keen to step down, but advances in smart city challenges could help fuel both companies ’commercial offerings. Alibaba’s City Brain follows more than 1,000 traffic lights in the company’s hometown, Hangzhou, a city of 10 million people. A pilot program found City Brain reduce congestion and helped shed light on the way to respond to emergencies.
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