The city of Tongren, in the southwestern Chinese province of Guizhou, has signed an agreement with Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) to develop the futuristic tube-travel system envisaged by Elon Musk.
HyperloopTT and Tongren Transportation & Tourism Investment Group announced the agreement yesterday, saying HyperloopTT would provide technology, engineering expertise and equipment, while Tongren will be responsible for certification, the regulatory framework and construction of the system.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®) announced that InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts has collaborated with Baidu to introduce the next generation of intelligent hospitality – smart rooms, which are powered by artificial intelligence.
From now on, guests staying at InterContinental® Beijing Sanlitun and InterContinental® Guangzhou Exhibition Centre will be among the first to enjoy the AI smart rooms. A total of 100 AI powered Club InterContinental suites will be available at InterContinental hotels in gateway cities and key destinations across China within the year.
JD.com is expanding its consumer base with drone delivery and local recruits who can exploit villages’ tight-knit social networks to drum up business.
In isolated regions, JD.com is expanding its reach, creating on-the-ground jobs and testing drone delivery. Will villagers be less tempted to leave for the big city?
Xia Canjun was born in 1979, the youngest of seven siblings, in Cenmang, a village of a hundred or so households nestled at the foot of the Wuling Mountains, in the far west of Hunan Province. Xia’s mother was illiterate, and his father barely finished first grade. The family made a living as corn farmers, and had been in Cenmang for more generations than anyone could remember. The region was poor, irrigation was inadequate—the family often went hungry—and there were few roads. Trips to the county seat, Xinhuang, ten miles away, were made twice a year, on a rickety three-wheeled cart, and until the age of ten Xia didn’t leave the village at all. But he was never particularly unhappy. “When you are a frog at the bottom of the well, the world is both big and small,” he likes to say, referring to a famous fable by Zhuangzi, the Aesop of ancient China, in which a frog, certain that nowhere can be as good as the environment he knows, is astonished when a turtle tells him about the sea. As a child, Xia said, he was “a happy frog,” content to play in the dirt roads between the mud houses of the village.
A Chinese student had his enrollment at a university suspended because of his father’s bad social credit score. The father, surnamed Rao, had failed to repay a $29,900 loan and was added to a debtor blacklist that prevented a university from accepting his son. State media reported that the incident also caused Rao’s social credit score to drop.
China is expected to roll out a national social credit system in 2020, but it remains to be seen if citizens will actually be given a “trustworthiness” score or if they’ll just be subjected to more blacklists.
The Chinese electric vehicle startup Byton is developing three vehicles, the first of which will hit the market in 2019.
The company has prioritized interior features, like touchscreens and adjustable seats, over traditional performance metrics, like range and acceleration, in part because it assumes autonomous driving technology will become available to consumers in the next few years.
Byton president and co-founder Daniel Kirchert told Business Insider that Byton will sell a car with Level 4 autonomy — which means the car can handle all driving functions in certain scenarios — by the end of 2020.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for a robot revolution in manufacturing to boost productivity.
Wages in China are rising, and it’s becoming harder to compete with cheap labor.
An aging population in China also necessitates automation. The working-age population, people age 15 to 64, could drop to 800 million by 2050 from 998 million today.
Chinese robotic growth is forecast to exceed 20 percent annually through 2020.
Select some live seafood in one of Alibaba’s Hema grocery stores in Shanghai, get it rung up and bagged, and a robotic arm will whisk it away to a kitchen. Minutes later, a pod will wheel out of the kitchen, pulling up to your table with your meal under a transparent dome.
The weapon is ‘mainly expected to be for Chinese police use’
Beijing (AFP) – A Chinese firm has developed a laser gun designed for police use that can set fire to protesters’ hair or banners from a range of almost one kilometre.
GM, Toyota and BYD are part of a potential $550 billion industry.
The first batches of batteries from electric and hybrid vehicles are hitting retirement age, yet they aren’t bound for landfills. Instead, they’ll spend their golden years chilling beer at 7-Elevens in Japan, powering car-charging stations in California and storing energy for homes and grids in Europe.
Lithium-ion car and bus batteries can collect and discharge electricity for another seven to 10 years after being taken off the roads and stripped from chassis—a shelf life with significant ramifications for global carmakers, electricity providers and raw-materials suppliers.
When you gaze into the sky, what do you see? If you happen to live in China, the answer might be surveillance drones disguised as birds, according to a new report from the South China Morning Post. The new report alleges that Chinese military and government agencies have been using undercover drones to spy on segments of the population, especially in an area of Western China that borders Russia, Mongolia, and Pakistan, among other countries.
Bristol-Myers Squibb announced today that its pioneering cancer immunotherapy drug Opdivo has been approved for sale in China.
Opdivo targets a protein called PD-1, which is effectively a braking signal in the immune system. Cancer cells are incredibly wily when it comes to evading the body’s own natural defenses, and one of the ways they manage this feat is by tricking the immune system into restraining its own attack dogs. So-called “checkpoint inhibitors” like Opdivo—which is often called by its biological name, nivolumab—essentially remove the biological leash, allowing immune cells to freely attack the cancer predator.
JD.com, one of China’s big e-commerce companies, has unveiled a warehouse in Shanghai that, it says, only keeps humans on board so they can service all the robots.
