Dr. Xu Wei also spoke at the scene about his greatest feelings about the FTC: 'Every time I participate in the FTC's competition, I will be impressed by the students' enthusiasm for the invention and their vitality. ' He said that the invention of the future of technology began with nurturing Today's Rising Star, Qualcomm as FIRST long-term strategic partner of the FTC race, has been extremely supportive and fully supports FIRST's philosophy.
Increased Power, Qualcomm Cultivates Future Technology Stars
Qualcomm is a longtime supporter of the FTC event and has sponsored the event for 11 consecutive years. Qualcomm’s support for the FTC has helped more than 400,000 students from 40 countries to participate in this robot event in China over the past 11 years. Qualcomm has accumulatively sponsored 13 FTC regional special events and provided support for 120 participating teams, directly benefiting more than 1,200 participating students.
This year, Qualcomm sponsored a total of 3 special events in Shenzhen, 3 special events in Shanghai and Beijing, and 28 participating teams. Take the Beijing tournament held this weekend as an example. Of the 33 teams participating in the competition, 6 are Qualcomm-sponsored teams. In addition, in order to encourage and support more Chinese teams to the United States to participate in the global finals, Qualcomm also set up three special awards this year to provide rewards for the top three Chinese teams.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to the FTC events, Qualcomm also sponsored the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC), the highest level FIRST Robotics Competition in China for the first time this year. FRC is FIRST's highest level robotics event, mainly for 15- 18-year-olds. Like the FTC, the FRC teams form a coalition and complete a series of tasks with their own industrial-grade robots to win the competition. Compared with the FTC, the FRC's mission is more complex and the difficulty of completion is even higher.
In addition to providing financial support, Qualcomm employees have also actively participated in and supported the FTC events and provided support for multiple competitions and teams. As of today, Qualcomm has more than 100 employees in China providing volunteer services for FTC events, including support technology. Testing, inspection, refereeing, judging and other work. Qualcomm employee volunteers also served as instructors for the participating teams. They provided technical guidance for students and helped them form teams before the match to stimulate and guide the team's innovative ideas. In order to deepen the FTC The understanding of the competition, Qualcomm employee volunteers began to build up FTC robots after work. Through practical actions, Qualcomm employee volunteers are inspiring the next generation of inventors with their sincerity, enthusiasm and professional interest in technological innovation. Just as Dr. The enthusiasm for the participating students expressed in the speech: 'Technology innovation is changing rapidly. Technologies such as 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, aerospace, 3D printing, etc. have crossed one threshold after another and triggered important changes. The younger generation Will become the witness and founder of this revolution. Through the FTC competition, young inventors will This opens the door to the future. Every attempt and participation they make will influence the next decade or even more.
Enabling terminals, opening a new era of intelligent interconnection
In the future, whether it is a mobile phone, a car or a robot, or an IoT terminal, it is inseparable from the connection, computation, and support of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. It has been the vision of mankind for many years to make intelligent intelligence in machine terminals. In recent years, with big data The emergence of new technologies such as deep learning, and the dramatic increase in computing power, artificial intelligence reasoning work is gradually shifting from the cloud to the terminal side. In the general trend of intelligent migration to terminals, Qualcomm's strong advantages in mobility and connectivity will be The development of the AI at the terminal side provides an important boost. Gary Brotman, director of product management at Qualcomm, once stated that 'data privacy, performance and overall reliability are important values of the AI on the terminal side, and the terminal side is also an advantage of Qualcomm.'
Qualcomm's exploration and deployment in the field of artificial intelligence can be traced back more than a decade ago. As early as 2007, Qualcomm began its exploration and research on artificial intelligence technology, and relied on it to provide low-power, high-performance heterogeneous computing. With deep experience and strengths in system-level solutions, the AI Engine has been introduced to combine software and hardware and work with eco-manufacturers to jointly accelerate the AI experience on the terminal side. Recently, Qualcomm Dutch researcher Taco Cohen and Maxwelling and his partners, together with the University of Amsterdam, wrote the paper "Spherical CNNs." This paper has stood out from nearly a thousand submissions submitted by the world's top artificial intelligence laboratories, and won the "International Conference on Learning Characterization (ICLR) 2018 Good Paper Award'.
Over the years, the basic technology invented by Qualcomm has given birth to products and experiences that can change people's lives. The development of artificial intelligence technology is expected to drive a new technological revolution. Qualcomm is also promoting the expansion of intelligence to the terminal side, through the ubiquitous terminal-side AI, Make people's lives more convenient and abundant.