Biometrics just the start for China’s Xiongan as JD rolls out smart city operating system

The first phase of a smart city operating system with support for biometrics being deployed in the Chinese metropolis of Xiongan has been unveiled by the country’s biggest internet company by revenue, JD.com.

According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the current project is in line with the smart cities development vision of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

JD calls the system an integrated and block data platform that will enable the assembly of all of the city’s data in one place, making it possible to be easily shared, the SCMP report adds.

The operating system, known as Intelligent City, was unveiled recently by JD Digits, the big data arm of the Chinese internet and ecommerce giant, in collaboration with the China Xiongan Group which is owned by the state.

The SCMP reports the smart city initiative for the Xiongan, which has a population of five million inhabitants and is located about 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing, is a planned city intended to help decongest the Chinese capital of less-important functions. Beijing now has more than 20 million inhabitants.

Once completed, the system will be able to alert relevant government departments of looming emergencies and is being built with many other applications, one of which has to do with COVID-19 prevention and control, the reported mentioned.

As per the SCMP report, the operating system which was launched at the JD Discovery event, collects standard government data, but also voice, video, and other kinds of data, which will be mined and analyzed.

“In the era of smart cities, we need not only speech and facial recognition, which belong to widely used artificial intelligence technology. We need more specific AI models for smart city applications such as traffic flow prediction, early warning for crowd gatherings and locations for charging stations,” Zheng Yu, JD vice president was quoted as explaining during the JD Discovery event.

SCMP notes that since President Xi announced a smart city project for the Xiongan new area, several tech giants including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, have started up hi-tech projects in the city.

Article Topics

AI  |  biometrics  |  China  |  facial recognition  |  smart cities  |  speech recognition  |  video surveillance  |  voice biometrics