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Head to Barcelona to see how Huawei Cloud is expanding across this world…and beyond
Virtual human welcomes visitors to this year’s MWC
Paid feature The tech world will be beating a path to Barcelona for MWC this year, and visitors to Huawei Cloud's stand there will be treated to a demonstration of how the cloud is preserving and changing this world, and beyond.
Visitors to Huawei Cloud's presence at the mega event are greeted by Sara, Huawei Cloud's virtual human, who will be interacting with visitors. When humans enter the Metaverse, they will encounter intelligence-based virtual human characters, who may be occupying service roles. For many, Sara will be their first encounter with the Metaverse, something that many companies are talking about. Sara can interact using both verbal and non-verbal communication and can detect tone of voice, facial expressions, and human gestures.
Sara was created by MetaStudio, Huawei's digital content pipeline, which supports and automates the production of film and TV content, from editing to 3D modelling, to rendering, and includes services such as video intelligence and spatial computing.
TV producers working on 4K can expect to slash their production cycle from weeks to under 24 hours. Looking ahead to new forms of content, the service also gives content creators a platform for creating the immersive, virtual future that the Metaverse represents.
But if Sara is a virtual human, real humans are also benefiting from Huawei Cloud, with the company highlighting the impact of its Pangu Drug Molecule Model in pharmaceutical research and development. The model has "learned" the chemical structures of 1.7 billion small molecules, and this knowledge has been put to work, in order to model and design new broad spectrum antibacterials.
By targeting optimisation on key compounds, the researchers have been able to reduce development times from years to just one month.
While we can see the immediate value of this work, given the last two years of pandemic, there are other broader ongoing social challenges that Huawei Cloud is tackling, from preserving threatened ecosystems and reducing technology's impact on this planet, to facilitating digital ecosystems off this planet.
Protected by the cloud
For example, Huawei Cloud is highlighting its contributions to conservation efforts for Darwin's Fox, a unique species of canid – distantly related to wolves rather than foxes - found in Chile's Nahuelbuta forest and its coastal islands.
Huawei is working with Chile's Ministry of the Environment and Superintendency of the Environment, Attica de los Bosques and NGO Rainforest Connection, using cloud intelligence together with Huawei's Guardian bioacoustics technology to prevent illegal logging and poaching in the forest and protect the unique environment that fosters these animals. Audio data is collected by the Guardian technology, transmitted wireless, and analysed in the cloud, 24x7, which means the animals can be researched, and protected in real time when threats are detected.
However, using the cloud to protect individual ecosystems will count for naught if technology's impact on the environment is not constrained. So, Huawei Cloud also highlights the technology behind its Gui'an data centre.
Phase One of this data centre in Gui'an New District, Guizhou Province, China, encompasses 51 buildings across 480,000 square metres. Nine of the buildings comprise the core data centre, supporting operational capacity of more than one million servers.
By employing innovative green and intelligent technologies, Huawei Cloud has achieved an industry leading PUE of just 1.12 for the facility. During full load operations, power draw will be reduced by over one billion kWh, saving 810,000 tons of carbon a year.
The innovative techniques developed at Gui'an will be shared with the world, with 10,000 people a year expected to attend the campus for training and internships.
Taking cloud-native beyond the clouds
But why restrict cloud technology to this world – or even virtual worlds. MWC attendees will also be treated to a deep dive into Huawei cloud's off-world Tiansuan Constellation computing platform.
This project has put its first satellite into orbit with a Huawei compute platform running Kubedge and the Sedna intelligence platform. This means the satellite has unified compute, application management, and "in-orbit intelligence inference". Further platforms will be put into orbit to create a computing network in space.
Advanced on-board compute will deliver improved data computing precision in orbit and also allow more analysis of images on the satellite itself, reducing the amount of data that needs to be transmitted back to earth. This makes the satellite more responsive and adaptable for a range of tasks.
Huawei cites the example of disaster prevention and flood management. When ground control makes a request for images of a potential disaster zone, in orbit inference can be used to select the best images to return to Earth, for example by eliminating those obscured by clouds, cutting the response time from a day to one hour.
The above examples highlight vastly different use cases, but it's important to remember that this is all enabled by Huawei Cloud's underlying philosophy of everything as a service, which MWC visitors can explore in depth in Barcelona.
Diving into Digital and Driving New Growth, with Everything as a Service
In a keynote speech under the theme of "Diving into Digital and Driving New Growth, with Everything as a Service" at MWC, William Dong, marketing director of Huawei cloud, introduced that Huawei's offering spans three key areas. Infrastructure as a Service for global accessibility builds on an expanding range of global data centres and networks to seamlessly connect people, things and applications. With the addition of four new regions – Kuala Lumpur, Abu Dhabi, Mexico City and Ulanqab – it now spans 27 regions across over 170 countries.
Technology as a Service uses this platform to enable enterprises to focus on their own innovation, while benefiting from the 100,000 engineers and $10bn in annual investment Huawei pours into it. Technology as a Service is delivered via four development pipelines - MetaStudio, ModelArts MLOps, DevCLoud and Data Governance - enabling software development and making it easier to develop and deliver.
Finally, Expertise as a Service brings Huawei Cloud and its partners together in a global ecosystem which distills best practices in digital transformation into digital assets. These are delivered as API services in Huawei Cloud's MacroVerse application platform as a service (aPaaS). Since its launch in September 2021, MacroVerse has ballooned to offer digital engines for payment, search, browsing, mapping and advertising, along with 50 scenario-specific cloud services. The platform also offers 128 kits and 20,000 API services across verticals including industrial, automotive, travel, retail, healthcare, interactive media and news.
So whether your interest is in reducing carbon emissions, saving foxes, and taking a new look at this planet, or delivering innovative business services, building the Metaverse, and going beyond cloud native, check out Huawei at MWC. And for that personal touch, just ask for Sara.
To learn more about Huawei Cloud, please click here.
Sponsored by Huawei.