If you can't see the outline of the world
How to move towards the great rivers and mountains ahead?
If you can't hear the voice of the world
How should we talk to the world?
How to let children approach artificial intelligence
Speculation and growth in dialogue with AI?
How to break down technical barriers
Let farmers enjoy the better life brought by technology?
……
Recently, the 4th Xiaomi Hackathon 2023 "Boundless Creativity, Endless Life" contest was successfully held. Within 48 hours , Xiaomi engineers from multiple departments in Beijing, Wuhan, Nanjing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other industrial areas burst out with creativity, put innovative technical ideas into practice, and produced 76 creative new technology works.
In order to better demonstrate the "maker" spirit and creative works of this hackathon, and uphold the vision of "making friends with users", on August 5, Xiaomi held the hackathon OPEN DAY in Beijing Xiaomi Science and Technology Park, and 76 teams participated in the hackathon . The 8 project teams that stood out from the team communicated face-to-face with users at the event site. This hackathon OPEN DAY connects technical engineers and users, listens to the real needs of users, and submits technical works to users for actual inspection, so that users can understand Xiaomi's technology and engineer culture through dialogue and experience.
Figure 1: On-site group photo
01
The technological ecology of the Internet of Everything
A technical system that integrates with multiple
During the event, Wang Bin, director of the AI Laboratory of Xiaomi Group Technical Committee, introduced Xiaomi's existing leading technologies. Xiaomi's technology research and development has entered 12 technical fields, including 5G mobile communication technology, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Manufacturing, entering robots, unmanned factories, smart electric vehicles, etc., with a total of 98 subdivisions.
Figure 2: Wang Bin, Director of the AI Laboratory of the Technical Committee of Xiaomi Group, made a speech
In 2022, Xiaomi proposed to build a Xiaomi technology ecosystem that is "people-centered and closely connects people and everything". At present, Xiaomi is building an ever-expanding technology scene, from smartphones to wearable devices, smart homes, to smart manufacturing, smart electric vehicles, and bionic robots. The beautiful smart life of the scene.
Figure 3: Xiaomi Technology Ecosystem
Today, Xiaomi's technology research and development has made new breakthroughs in terms of depth and breadth. In terms of depth , in terms of technology such as imaging, charging, folding screens, and privacy protection, Xiaomi has continuously made leading technological breakthroughs, bringing users a better experience, and at the same time strongly supporting the company's high-end strategy. In terms of breadth , Xiaomi has opened up new fields including smart electric vehicles. The entire technology system has continued to grow, and a large number of innovations have emerged one after another. The full-size humanoid bionic robot CyberOne and the CyberDog bionic quadruped robot represent Xiaomi's cutting-edge exploration in the field of robotics. At the same time, Xiaomi's intelligent manufacturing system is also continuously exporting and empowering the entire manufacturing industry.
02
Focus on the real needs of users
Accessibility projects shine
Relying on Xiaomi's multi-level and diversified leading technologies, this competition has produced a large number of project results combining innovative thinking and advanced technology. Based on the six-dimensional evaluation of innovation, technology leadership, application scenarios, user experience, commercial value, and work completion, there will be 1 first prize, 2 second prizes, 3 third prizes, and 6 excellence awards. With 4 Starry Project special prizes .
The award-winning works cover cutting-edge technology exploration, daily office work, life and entertainment, etc., with a variety of types. Xiaomi engineers not only combine innovative ideas with advanced technology, but also deeply understand the needs of social reality and truly solve user problems. In particular, many projects focus on the application of barrier-free technology, so that technology can benefit more people and truly bring a better life to everyone.
The first prize-winning project "Xiaomi AI Object-Recognition Glasses-Vision System Based on Semantic Understanding" uses glasses as a carrier to carry a visual recognition system. Through binocular cameras, it can recognize the name, distance, location, color, text, and people of objects. Multi-modal recognition of face, etc., providing visually impaired people with multiple functions such as person recognition, object recognition, road recognition, and word recognition. The project innovatively combines the visual recognition model and the big language model, so that users can not only understand the world in front of them through natural dialogue, but also understand its logical relationship, and take another step towards truly "understanding the world". At the same time, the project has also carried out cutting-edge explorations for the full-scale humanoid bionic robot CyberOne and the CyberDog bionic quadruped robot to understand the world in front of them.
Figure 4: The initial rendering of the design of the Xiaomi AI Object-Recognition Glasses;
Figure 5: 3D printed engineering machine demo during the 48-hour competition
Figure 6: On-site guests experience "Xiaomi AI Object-Recognition Glasses"
The second prize project "Xiaomi Heart Control-Intelligent Control Center Based on Visual Recognition System" paid attention to the smart home experience of people with speech disabilities. Existing smart devices are mostly controlled by mobile phone control and voice control, but voice control is not conducive to the use of speech-impaired people. Therefore, the team members designed this brand-new gesture interaction intelligent center based on the visual recognition system. Through the depth camera combined with gesture control, the spatial relationship between the palm and the device is calculated, so that the smart device can realize "where to point and control", with a more natural The interactive way allows more people to enjoy the fun of new technology.
Figure 7: "Xiaomi Heart Control - Intelligent Control Center Based on Visual Recognition System"
Figure 8: On-site guests experience "Xiaomi Xpress Control"
We live in a world full of sound, but the 80 million hearing-impaired people around the world experience sound differently than we do. The "Sound Perspective" project, which won the third prize , had insight into this need, and the team carried out the design based on the sound event detection algorithm and the array pickup algorithm. By displaying the type, direction and magnitude of sound on the radar map in real time, "Sound Perspective" can help hearing-impaired people discover the surrounding sound and accurately locate the direction of the sound source, so that they can feel the surrounding sound more intuitively. At the same time, this technology can also be applied to automobiles, security and other fields, providing more convenience and security for people's lives.
Figure 9: Effect picture of "Sound Perspective" project
Fu Gaoshan, partner of OnePlus One Disabled Welfare Group and founder of Inclusion X, pointed out at the event that there is a huge domestic market for products that assist the disabled, and companies must rely on their strong manufacturing capabilities to actively fulfill their social responsibilities of assisting the disabled with technology.
Figure 10: Partner of One Plus One Disabled Welfare Group, founder of Inclusion X
Fu Gaoshan made a speech
Insight into social needs and practical solutions to social problems are essential elements of good technology. For a long time, Xiaomi has adhered to the three iron laws of "technology-based, cost-effective, and making the coolest products". "Technology-based" means that Xiaomi regards technology as the core driving force, encourages technological innovation, breaks through technical problems, provides a better platform and opportunity for unconstrained creative ideas to be put into practice, and jointly creates the coolest through teamwork and thinking collisions. technology.
03
Creativity without boundaries, endless life
Dark Horse Works Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom
ChatGPT set off a wave of new technologies. In this year's hackathon, AI-related technologies have attracted much attention.
In terms of artificial intelligence, Wang Bin pointed out that Xiaomi AI is dominated by independent research and development, fully empowering Xiaomi's various business lines, and has created the industry's leading intelligent life assistant Xiao Ai. Xiaomi AI's independent research and development technology has achieved a series of results in computer vision, speech acoustics, natural language processing (NLP), knowledge graph, machine learning and other research directions.
Among them, major breakthroughs have been made in speech recognition, voice wake-up, voiceprint recognition, spoken language evaluation, speech synthesis, singing synthesis, AI composition and arrangement, etc. As of 2022, Xiaoai has 115 million monthly active users, making it one of the busiest voice assistants in the world. The acoustic voice team has undertaken an average of 1.26 billion requests per day on Xiaomi mobile phones × AIoT devices, and provided a total of 215.8 billion interactive voice services for 459 million devices.
Figure 11: Classmate Xiao Ai
The smart speaker industry has developed rapidly in the past ten years, and the development of voice interaction technology has become more and more mature. However, technological progress will never stop here. How to transcend rationality and clear information transmission, so that human-computer interaction can move towards emotional communication and non-verbal symbols A higher level of communication?
The second-prize-winning project "Encounter-Holographic Smart Companion" explored the new form of Xiaoai speaker development, allowing Xiaoai speakers to organically combine with holographic projection, ChatGPT, and multi-modal interaction, turning traditional voice assistants into reality with virtual Personalized AI with images and complete interactive functions. Virtual characters enter real life and break the framework of mechanical intelligence interaction in a more three-dimensional and active way, allowing users to start a new journey with AI partners in the future smart home scene.
Figure 12: On-site guests experience the "Encounter-Holographic Smart Companion" project
Excellence Award "Storykids" project , linking AIGC with children's thinking exercises, created a voice education game that interacts with AI. The project establishes user portraits by analyzing the basic information of users, and uses speech recognition and speech-to-text conversion capabilities as well as ChatGPT logic analysis to match children's version reasoning stories of corresponding levels of difficulty, allowing children to solve story puzzles in human-computer interaction and improve thinking ability.
Figure 13: On-site guests experience the "Storykids" project
These excellent works focus on the daily needs of users and help improve the quality of life of users. This competition also produced two projects focusing on sports and health, combining fitness and technology to make sports more interesting.
The third prize "Fun Sports and Fitness" project, in order to solve the two major problems of modern people's fast-paced life, high work pressure, and lack of time and motivation to exercise, developed a fun app that built sports and fitness functions into mobile phones, allowing fragmented Time can also "move". The project uses leading computer vision technology and deep learning algorithm to accurately capture the user's actions and provide real-time feedback. By analyzing the user's posture and actions, it provides accurate action counting or game feedback, especially using Holt's double-exponential smoothing method. The jitter problem of key points improves the recognition accuracy.
Figure 14: Schematic diagram of the "Fun Sports and Fitness" project
Figure 15: On-site guests experience the "Fun Sports and Fitness" project
The Excellence Award project "Playing Ball" turned its attention to the game record needs of football fans, adding a football mode to the Mi Band, enabling the football mode during the game, and using data for post-match analysis to realize the playback of all players' game tracks and personal dynamics. Heat map, personal dynamic sprint map and other functions. Small and convenient, users can experience professional post-match experience without additional cost, which greatly enhances the fun of the game.
Figure 16: Schematic diagram of the "Kickball" project
Lei Jun, the founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, has repeatedly emphasized: "Xiaomi regards engineers as the most important asset, and we respect every crazy idea." Xiaomi has a very strong engineer culture, and the hackathon competition has been held this year. Through the hackathon, Xiaomi has provided more stages for engineers, allowing them to stand in the center of the stage and have more opportunities to demonstrate their ingenuity and enhance their sense of accomplishment.
A large number of young engineers also emerged in this hackathon. A total of 28 star teams participated in the competition. The seven star teams that advanced to the final evaluation all won awards and handed in a rather surprising answer sheet. In addition to the "Sound Perspective" project, the "Mi Nong-AI Powered Smart Agriculture" project also comes from the Fanxing Project. The project relies on intelligent monitoring (sensor module), intelligent analysis (AI intelligent algorithm, control system), intelligent control (smart agricultural machinery) Large modules, focusing on intelligent analysis (AI intelligent algorithm), provide technical support for abnormal detection of crop diseases and insect pests, showing the demeanor and vitality of Xiaomi's young engineers.
04
technology-based
Let technology lead a better smart life
"Always make friends with users and be the coolest company in users' hearts" is Xiaomi's vision and the driving force behind Xiaomi's continuous technological innovation. This hackathon OPEN DAY is not only to show users Xiaomi's innovative technology, but also to share experiences and stories in the process of technology development, and more importantly, to let users feel the power of engineers behind Xiaomi's technology.
Figure 17: 2023 Xiaomi's 4th Hackathon OPEN DAY
Profound technical accumulation and R & D investment are the key support for the high-end breakthrough of the whole series. Xiaomi always strives to provide engineers with a wider room for development and more relaxed conditions for innovation, so that every crazy idea can be realized. Xiaomi's engineers are determined to forge ahead, explore technologies and products that have never been tried before, debug and optimize day and night, repeatedly sculpt every detail, and strive to produce every product that far exceeds user expectations. A large part of the joy of their work comes from their own dedication and dedication. Because of their existence, users can better enjoy the beautiful life brought by technology.
In terms of R&D investment, Lei Jun emphasized that Xiaomi’s R&D investment will be about 17 billion yuan in 2022, and it is expected to reach 20 billion yuan this year, and the R&D investment will exceed 100 billion yuan in the next five years. At the same time, Xiaomi will continue to strengthen the construction of its engineer team. In 2021, Xiaomi will launch a wide range of talent incentive programs such as the "Young Engineer" program. The incentive targets include outstanding talents such as young engineers and technical experts, and continue to build a strong technological innovation force. In addition, Xiaomi also held a million-dollar technology award to encourage engineers to come from behind to the front of the stage, so that more people can see their shining technological achievements.
Figure 18: Xiaomi’s R&D investment in the next five years is expected to be 100 billion
While continuing to explore cutting-edge innovative technologies and continuously strengthening its technical and talent reserves, Xiaomi has also accumulated a wealth of intellectual property rights. As of March 31, 2023, Xiaomi's technology research and development has more than 32,000 patent authorizations worldwide, ranking 10th in the global 5G standard essential patents. Adhering to the concept of technology-based, a brand new Xiaomi has started, and I believe that more surprising changes are on the way.
The creative journey of Xiaomi engineers is not over. Every bright spot that flashes in the mind has the possibility of being realized. In an open and friendly technical atmosphere, we look forward to Xiaomi engineers bringing more experiential, humanized, and cooler products to every user!
