On the afternoon of September 7, the fifth roadshow of the CUNJC on international technology was successfully held online. The roadshow was co-organised by Cambridge University - Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation (CUNJC) and Nanjing Overseas Collaborative Innovation Centre (Cambridge, UK). Shang Zhenbai, Deputy Director of the Nanjing Jiangbei New Area Science & Technology Innovation Bureau, delivered a speech online, and Albert Wu, General Manager of CUNJC hosted the roadshow.

From the aspects of policies, capital and regional position, Shang Zhenbai briefly overviewed the scientific and technological innovation environment of Jiangbei New Area, a state-level new area where the Centre is located. He said, “at the critical juncture of global economic changes when the innovation, science & technology and industry are intertwined, scientific and technological innovation is a key to the promotion of regional high-quality development. Efforts to combine science and technology with industry and strengthen international cooperation have been integrated in the development genes of Jiangbei New Area. We sincerely invite Cambridge alumni and scientific and technological innovation entrepreneurs to locate in Jiangbei New Area through our Centre.” The relevant members of Jiangbei New Area Industrial Technology Research and Innovation Park also shared relevant scientific and technological innovation support policies of the park.

Representatives from more than 30 investment institutions were invited to participate in the roadshow online, including Linear Venture, ZhenFund, Source Code Capital, K2VC, China Merchants Venture, Yuanhe Capital and Jiangbei Jia Kang Fund. They interacted with the roadshow presenters, made professional reviews of the projects and offered some constructive suggestions.

In recent years, Internet giants have made active efforts to lay out in the AR/VR industry. Google acquired Raxium, a MicroLED technology start-up, in the first half of this year. ByteDance spent billions of RMB acquiring Pico one year ago, which is a hardware company specialised in all-in-one VR headset. According to Bloomberg, the AR industry is predicted to be $340 billion by 2028.

However, due to the existing technical threshold, the AR experience is not "friendly" to all users. Some users may feel dizzy and sick when wearing AR devices, unable to have the sensory experience created by the mixed reality technology. This dizziness is caused by vergence accommodation conflict (VAC), a recognised problem in the industry, which makes the wearer physiologically discomfortable and greatly limits the popularity of AR wearables, so it is widely regarded as the last technological bottleneck for AR devices in the industry. According to an industry report from Greenlight Insights, resolving the VAC issue will directly lead to an additional $10 billion enterprise AR spend by 2026. One thing to be noted is that VAC is also a prevailing problem in VR, which seriously affect users’ experience.

AR-X Photonics, a roadshow project dedicated to developing AR glasses with innovation in optical technology, offers a solution to the VAC problem. The founding team members are all from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, among which, the co-founder and CEO Dr. Pawan Shrestha is RAEng Enterprise Fellow and Senior Research Associate of University of Cambridge, who has over 9 years of experience in optics and photonics research.

By combining Maxwellian display technology with nanophononics technology, responding to the visual mechanism of the brain, and bringing the object into focus and display at all times, the optical lens developed in this project does not cause VAC discomfort, and has the technological advantages such as large field of view, high quality 3D imaging, no rainbow effect, high adaptability to environmental brightness, suitability for high-speed devices and good compatibility with existing products. The technology developed by AR-X Photonics also has highly competitive advantages in VR devices and has enormous potential in VR applications.

“So far, none of the subjects have reported any discomfort after wearing the prototype product, which is something impossible with existing AR products on the market,” Dr. Pawan Shrestha said, “Thanks to the technological advantages of AR-X Photonics, the project has a wide range of applications in the fields of educational training, healthcare, manufacturing and logistics, sports, etc., and initial cooperation with enterprise customers have already been on the agenda.”

While aiming at the AR/VR industry, leading Internet-based enterprises have also shown concerns for the “automobile” business and made their way to develop self-driving capabilities; meanwhile, the O2O lifestyle such as takeaway, e-commerce, and intra-city express service has become a common occurrence, thus, the market segment of the non-manned driverless vehicle express service has imaginative prospects.

The roadshow project “Whale Dynamic” is a technology company that specializes in autonomous driving, with a goal to become the “Tesla of driverless delivery vehicles”. At the beginning, the team focused on the development of Level 4 passenger car driving automation technology, which is regarded as “truly driverless technology” in the industry, and they gradually applied this technology to driverless delivery vehicles in the course of commercialization, thus the company acquired a dimension reduction advantage.

Unlike conventional driverless delivery in indoor or in semi-enclosed settings, Whale Dynamic focuses on exploring the road-level driverless delivery vehicle market. Its vehicles can meet the operational requirements in open environments, and are applicable to delivery scenarios with high load capacity and high mobility.

Chang Yufei, the founder and CEO of the team, was graduated from the University of Cambridge with a master’s degree in nanotechnology and a research interest is in MEMS sensors. The team members have years of development experience in leading institutions such as Baidu, Huawei, Chinese Academy of Sciences, etc. They have a grasp of the complete development chain of in-vehicle software and hardware combination and expertise in the full stack fundamental autonomous driving technologies, including:

Multi-sensor fusion positioning, patented multi-sensor fusion technology, pre-fusion hardware design, centimetre-level high-precision mapping, chassis design and drive-by-wire modification, passenger car level decision making/control, etc.

“Our team takes the development path of the passenger vehicle algorithm verification — with steering wheel chassis transplantation algorithm — urban public roads autonomous vehicle mass production. This is the most advanced international autonomous driving development path, and there is no other company taking this development path in China”, Chang Yufei emphasized.

For the purpose of commercialization, Whale Dynamic relies on the passenger vehicle L4 level autonomous driving technology to develop an overall solution for urban public roads autonomous vehicles, striving to develop driverless delivery vehicles that are advanced, reliable and economical and eventually introduce a product that packages the autonomous vehicles and cloud services as a whole. It is stated that the team has now achieved a sharp reduction in the unmanned vehicle manufacturing costs, benefiting the driverless delivery scenarios such as express delivery, takeaway and large supermarket retail.

In the “14th Five-Year Plan”, it is clearly stated the necessity to “accelerate digital development and build a digital China”, activate the potential of data elements, drive changes in production, lifestyle and governance with digital transformation as a whole, and promote data-enabled collaborative transformation of the entire industrial chain. In response to this spirit and the question of how to promote the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, and contribute to the improvement of industrial efficiency and management level, the roadshow projects “Nanjing Mingshu Data”, and “Foundational Software of Computing Power Network” proposed a strategic path of “digital intelligence + platform”.

Better city, better life; smarter digital transformation, smarter cities. The urban planning and construction in the new era are promoted by both the traditional and new infrastructures. The roadshow project “Nanjing Mingshu Data” focuses on the field of major infrastructure and aims to tackle the difficulties throughout the process of “investment, financing, construction, management and operation” of infrastructure projects under the PPP model (Public-Private Partnership), especially the pain points in the middle and later stages (construction and operation stages). It is dedicated to using big data to improve public governance, infrastructure and public service provision.

“Extending the requirements and accumulated technologies of Beijing Mingshu Data in the ‘investment and financing’ links, the newly-built Nanjing Mingshu team attaches more importance to the links of ‘construction, management and operation’, with a focus on Yangtze River Delta and an attempt to radiate the Central China”, said Mr. Xiao Guangrui, the co-founder of Nanjing Mingshu Data and a representative of the roadshow. Xiao Guangrui holds the master’s degree in Sustainable Development Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and currently he is PPP expert of the Ministry of Finance, PPP expert of the National Development and Reform Commission. The team he leads has over 20 years of experience in major infrastructure, information technology and PPP projects, and has long been involved in top-level design and relevant policy formulation in the domestic infrastructure sector.

Combined with AIOT and digital twin technology means, and with a focus on the whole process digital management, infrastructure digital intelligence and AI big data analysis, as well as providing services for competent departments and local governments, infrastructure investment and operation platforms, social capital and financial institutions, Nanjing Mingshu Data has developed a series of PPP + BIM + Cloud + AI integrated SaaS platforms, which can provide PPP data analysis, integrated information management system development, whole process consulting, whole life cycle asset management, as well as appraisal and rating services, and cover subdivisional application scenarios such as smart rail traffic, smart water affairs, smart cultural tourism, etc. In response to the pain points of infrastructure projects such as large capital volume, long operation cycle and relatively extensive management, these platforms are expected to help improve the overall economic efficiency of infrastructure projects.

If the new digital infrastructure is the foundation of the digital economy, then computing power is the core productivity of the digital economy. Currently, the thriving cutting-edge digital industries such as artificial intelligence, AR/VR and digital currency all rely on the massive computing power.

Therefore, it is imperative to promote the efficient and reasonable allocation of computing power resources in the face of the contradiction between the demand for computing power and the future shortage of computing power supply in society. In February this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, in conjunction with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Cyberspace Administration of China, etc., officially launched the “east-to-west computing resource transfer project” to transfer computing resources from the more prosperous eastern regions of China to the less developed western regions. The roadshow project “Foundational Software of Computing Power Network” is committed to optimizing the allocation of computing resources and getting a firm foothold in this segment market.

The project founder, Liang Lin, holds the master’s degree in in Software Engineering, University of Oxford, and has 12 years of R&D experience in global enterprise-level distributed systems. The core technical members of the team are from the Department of Computer Science or Mathematics of University of Oxford, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and University of Sydney.

“In digital age, computing power is the hydropower in agriculture age and the electricity in industrial age. The project is dedicated to promoting the distribution of computing power resources,” said Liang Lin, “By implementing the in-house developed distributed stream processing, heterogeneous computing, serverless architecture, edge computing, in-network computing, software defined network, and cluster orchestration technology, musys computing power network can allow the distributed system to be deployed on end-devices, creating an uniform ubiquitous computing power infrastructure of “Cloud (cloud data centre) - Edge (edge server) - End (end device)” to abstract, control and manage the computing power, distribute underutilised computing power to where it is needed, and  release computing power productivity. Currently, it has already been applied in the fields of radio frequency monitoring, urban public security and protection, and electrical safety”.