President Xi Jinping has a good understanding of big data and its social impact, said a top London scientist who met him during Xi's historic state visit to the United Kingdom in 2015. Guo Yike, director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London, recalled the clarity of Xi's thinking. He certainly had a clear engineer's view of things, particularly in data analysis methods, Guo said. President Xi engaged in all the applications and responded very nicely about my research topics. I could clearly see the engineering background of this leader. As part of Xi's tour to the UK in 2015, he visited Imperial College London, where Guo presented a data-driven analysis of the Belt and Road Initiative's economic and social impact, and demonstrated how smart-city researchers are monitoring and analyzing mass transportation data on Shanghai's subway network. When I was talking about the Shanghai metro, he clearly saw that and said, 'this could be very useful for monitoring the possible risk'. So he understood it very quickly, and I think he is a wise leader, Guo said. Though it was but a brief meeting, Guo was struck by Xi's amiability. I didn't feel nervous when he shook hands with me, and we were chatting a lot. I felt he was easy to talk to, Guo said. A highlight for Guo came when he handed first lady Peng Liyuan a perfectly fitting new cape that was designed with the help of image processing technology that analyzed 700 photos of her. That technology has important uses, Guo said. Now we have developed this technology much further. We need very few pictures to generate a 3D model, making it easier for online clothes shopping. In the past decade, Imperial College London has become China's premier research collaborator in Britain. The college's Chinese partners include Huawei Technologies and scientific institutes at Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Peking universities as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The leading data scientist said Xi's visit to the UK brought China and the UK very close. His trip to Imperial definitely enhanced our relations with China from the research point of view and also from all sides, Guo said. We're now pretty tightly connected with a lot of Chinese industries and Chinese universities, in particular in areas of data science and artificial intelligence. He said Xi's visit came at a great time for AI and data science because it marked the moment when the technology was set to drive modern industry and modern technological development. In the next five years, China is likely to surpass the United States and become the largest economy in the world while facing the challenge of changing its industrial structure, Guo said. He added that it will be important for China to leverage its current position and become a main driving force for innovation that focuses on original research, rather than relying on existing Western research results. Zhang Yangfei contributed to this story custom rubber braceletsvinyl wristbandsballer bands24hourwristbandsbracelet maker onlinesilicone fidget spinnerwristbands online
Passengers head home at a railway station in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, on a smoggy day, Jan 17, 2017. [Photo/IC] To cope with the smog that has plagued North China for years, one man has come up with an innovative idea that might go beyond your imagination. Du Honglai, a resident of Beijing, has applied for a national patent for his idea, which proposes the mobilization of all the city's residents to fan away the smog, according to a report from the Legal Daily. Du said the approach requires 15 million people to wave a fan at the same time in the same direction, which can produce powerful winds. He said the new approach not only is low cost and effective, but also generates no secondary air pollution. According to his calculations, if 15 million people wave fans at the same time in the same direction for an hour, the air that occupies a space 40 meters high, 20 kilometers long and 20 km wide (roughly the area of downtown Beijing) will be expelled 68 km away. Du calls for government agencies to offer a fan to all able-bodied people in the city to expel the smog during breaks from class and work, according to a report of thepaper.cn. In his application, Du has also designed fans in a variety of sizes that fit people of different ages and physical conditions. But the man did not reveal whether he has done any experiments on his idea. The patent application Du submitted in March has not yet been approved for substantive examination by the State Intellectual Property Office. The website of the SIPO shows that Du has also applied for patents for his inventions including a timed mosquito killer and nose plug for swimming. In 2016, Beijing's density of PM2.5, hazardous airborne particles measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, was 74 milligrams per cubic meter, double the health maximum of 35 mg per cubic meter set by the government.
