It is in our shared interest to join hands as we step into the digital age
By Abraham Liu, Huawei’s Chief Representative to European Institutions and the President of its European Public Affairs and Communication Office
The digital age is approaching, bringing with it unprecedented opportunities for the continent. The EU's digital economy is growing by 12% a year on average, seven times the growth rate of other sectors. Over the next five years, digitisation is estimated to generate over EUR 110 billion of economic revenue for Europe.
As for Huawei, we have been focusing on digitisation since the company was founded over 30 years ago. We aim to bring digital to every person, home and organisation for a fully connected, intelligent Europe.
Huawei's growth in Europe has benefited from the peaceful and stable political environment, the open and fair business environment, and the robust development of the European Single Market. Europe has become our second "home", next to China, in terms of local investment, ecosystem cooperation and staff numbers.
Over the past 18 years, Huawei has invested over USD 1 billion in European R&D, local procurement reached over USD 37 billion between 2009 and 2018, and we established strong partnerships with more than 140 European universities and research and consulting institutes. We now have 12 200 employees here and over 70 % of them are hired locally.
Huawei has put down deep roots and become an inseparable part of Europe.
Striving towards common goals
Europe is open and inclusive, and this allows us to put aside differences and work together effectively. The bloc’s digitisation is gathering speed, driven by breakthroughs in 5G, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, cloud computing and other technologies.
Huawei vigorously collaborates with many different European partners, contributing to the digitisation and the growth of numerous industries.
Huawei's Cybersecurity Executive Briefing Centre will open its doors on 5 March
To make it easier for its European partners to collaborate with Huawei in an environment of fact-based trust and security, Huawei will be opening a Cybersecurity Executive Briefing Centre in Brussels on 5 March.
The opening event will bring together leading representatives from governments, business and academia, as well as EU policy-makers, to visit Huawei’s new facilities in Brussels and discuss the next steps for a secure digital future.
“Huawei’s EU Cybersecurity Centre will be a place for exhibition and experimentation on the possibilities offered by 5G in many areas, from communications to connected cars and energy, where our experts will be able to explain the technical aspects behind our products in a way that is understandable for both policy-makers and customers,” said Abraham Liu, Huawei’s Chief Representative to European Institutions and the President of its European Public Affairs and Communication Office.
“The centre will be a hub for cooperation between Huawei and the European ICT ecosystem by allowing information exchange on key issues such as standardisation, certification, and security requirements, with a view to contributing to the Digital Single Market and the Security Union,” explained Tony Graziano, Vice-President of Huawei's European Public Affairs and Communication Office.
The centre will also allow customers to test Huawei’s products and to remotely check their source code, delivering on the company’s commitment to consolidate transparency and trust in the digital world.
Cybersecurity Executive Briefing Centre opening: find out more
Get your facts straight: Huawei answers the tough questions
What is Huawei doing to protect my personal data? What is Huawei's relationship with the Chinese government? What is Huawei doing to answer concerns about security? Is Huawei banned in France? And what is the situation in Canada?
Find answers to these and any other questions about what’s going on with Huawei in our Q&A.
This app helps visually impaired people ‘see’ emotions through the power of sound
By Tony Graziano, Vice-President of Huawei's European Public Affairs and Communication Office
There’s been a lot of talk about the problems Artificial Intelligence might cause “if let loose” in the workplace and home, or in terms of personal data and privacy. The potential for AI to improve society, however, is really quite breathtaking. This is why Huawei has decided to highlight how AI can be used to do good, beginning with these apps to improve the everyday lives of people who are visually or hearing impaired.
Huawei’s Facing Emotions app, which can be downloaded from Google Play and Huawei’s own AppGallery, helps visually impaired people ‘see’ emotions through the power of sound.
The debut of Facing Emotion follows Huawei’s StorySign, another app which taps AI tools, such as image recognition and optical character recognition (OCR), to translate popular children’s books into sign language.
Such apps are only the first to provide evidence of the marvellous potential for AI to work for the better of society and are being highlighted in “AI for Good”, a global campaign by developers to promote the far-reaching benefits of the technology.
A new world with smiles
A simple smile is something we all take for granted. But imagine a world without smiles? It is the world of the visually impaired; unable to see faces and read emotions, they are often literally left in the dark. Now Huawei’s Facing Emotions app allows blind people to ‘see’ or experience emotions, on the faces of people they are speaking to, using the power of AI.
Winners of the 2018 contest in Sweden use AI to identify the content of images
Winners of the 2018 Huawei European Student Challenge developed a neural net to identify images using Artificial Intelligence algorithms, at a hackathon organised by Huawei Sweden at KTH University in Stockholm in December.
The team put its success down to “keeping it simple”. Here we interview them about their project and what they think the future holds with AI.
Could you provide a short description of your winning project for the layman – which problem did your project solve, and how? How is it using AI to achieve this?
Miquel: One of the common tasks AI algorithms are used for is to identify images. To do this, a neural net (inspired by the way the brain works) is trained by showing it lots of examples of images and what they contain (labels). The proposed challenge was: how can we use a large number of unknown images (without any labels) in order later to train this neural net on fewer examples, without its effectiveness being compromised?
Our solution consisted first in training a neural net on the unlabelled images, from which we were capable of extracting a compressed representation of the images (shapes, lines, etc.). This first part of the neural net can be taken advantage of when training with the labelled examples, reducing the amount of these we need to create a working neural net able to identify the content of images.
How did you benefit from the competition? Was it a useful training/learning experience? Did you enjoy the collaboration with your peers?
Sandra: The whole competition was an incredible experience. Because time was limited, you needed to solve the challenge posed in a short time and efficiently, together with your colleagues. Then, the competition was a complete learning experience, really useful for learning how to solve problems as quickly as possible.
Daniel: It was my second hackathon and my first one related to Machine Learning, so I got a whole new dimension of practical experience, such as new tools and platforms, new prototyping techniques, new ways of quickly finding solutions, etc. Also, a quite useful insight into how these competitions are organised and executed. We are all good friends in our team, and we were in a great mood that day, so we worked as a well-oiled machine. It was lots of fun!
We have a universal method to help us choose the right way for the future
By Dr Walter Weigel, Vice-President of the Huawei European Research Institute (ERI)
What’s the key to unlocking global growth? This is not a question of opinion: the figures are quite clear. The average return on digital investments is a staggering 6.7 times higher than for non-digital ones.
Today’s leading companies in the digital domain have a few things in common: they have invested heavily in digital assets, embraced digital services and are now earning the rewards of this digital ‘spillover’ effect. The way towards the global digital economy will be led by those who overcome obstacles to technology adoption, who create environments that incentivise investment and who welcome participation and innovation.
Ironically, these facts and figures are taken from a September 2017 report by Huawei and Oxford Economics. The university recently announced its decision to no longer accept participation and innovation in the form of research grants or donations from Huawei.
The report sets out different scenarios for our digital future. The high-digitisation scenario foresees the biggest boost to the global GDP in 2025 – USD 1.7 trillion, the equivalent of putting an extra USD 500 per year in the pockets of every working-age member of the global population. The report stresses, however, that to achieve this, economies need to maintain an aggressive pace of digital investment and work together to deliver a strong digital strategy. It recommends opening the doors to the digital economy - to as wide a pool of individuals and companies as possible.
Making decisions about science
Sixteen months on, where do we stand today? Oxford University based its decision to shut its doors on “public concerns”. Academic freedom is usually defined as the freedom of teachers and students to pursue research without unreasonable interference by external pressure. So how do we define ‘unreasonable’?
This will attract the big investments needed for infrastructure
By Reza Karimi, Director of Corporate Strategy, Huawei
We can all agree that there is a need for both licensed and unlicensed spectrum to prepare for the deployment of the new wave of 5G communications technologies, but I am not convinced that more unlicensed spectrum is the priority, as some people would suggest. We of course need appropriate amounts of both kinds of spectrum. But right now, timely availability of licensed spectrum should be the priority.
Quality of access
With licensed spectrum, you make a payment to the regulator and in return you get the benefits of guaranteed quality of access to spectrum. With unlicensed spectrum, you get free shared access to spectrum but no guarantees. So they do play different roles, and this is well understood.
The question is whether we need a significant amount of additional unlicensed spectrum for 5G. I’d argue that there is already plenty of unlicensed spectrum available in Europe: 800 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 60 GHz. In fact, today, we have more unlicensed spectrum than licensed spectrum. And lots more unlicensed spectrum is in the pipeline at 6 GHz and 66 GHz.
So do we need any additional unlicensed spectrum? I’m not sure…
Certainty needed for users
If anything, I’d say that regulators should focus their efforts on making licensed spectrum available for 5G in a timely manner. Licensed spectrum that is defragmented in frequency, defragmented geographically, and will bring certainty to the market for the huge investments needed in large-scale 5G infrastructures.
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