CHINA / SOCIETY
Dubai enhances cooperation with Chinese companies in AI transformation
Published: May 04, 2019 09:33 PM
Dubai enhanced cooperation with Chinese companies as the city is ambitiously building itself as a world leading smart city. 

A two-day summit on artificial intelligence (AI) - AI Everything - kicked off on Dubai on Tuesday, attracting more than a hundred experts, companies and government officials in the field, including Chinese technological com-panies like Alibaba Cloud, Huawei and SenseTime. 

Dr. Aisha Bin Bishir, Director General of Smart Dubai Of-fice, told the Global Times at the summit that artificial intelligence is an important field of cooperation between China and Dubai since the two sides reached agree-ments on technological exchanges under the Belt and Road Initiative two years ago. 

As to the building of Smart City, Dr. Aishar said that they are working closely with Chinese companies to find out what technologies could be introduced in Dubai. This in-cludes smart pay technology from Alibaba, which had been widely used in China and promoting a cashless lifestyle in the country.       

The director general also mentioned that Dubai is work-ing with Huawei in 5G networking for the 2020 Dubai World Expo. 

Talking about controversies over the company in 5G technology over alleged security concerns of the US, she said that security concerns should not be the reason to block cooperation.

Dubai companies also showed huge interest in Chinese companies' products. 

Muath Dassan, a director at Dubai security company Al Maalim International, told the Global Times that a vital advantage of Chinese companies is that they can pro-vide full solutions rather than just solving a specific tech-nical problem.

He made the remarks after trying a face-recognition sys-tem developed by Huawei that was exhibited at the summit, saying the system would work well for some of his clients, such as airports.

Chinese companies also value the Dubai market as a gateway to the Middle East Asia (MEA)and Africa. 

"There are large areas for cooperation in the AI industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)," Ni Wenfeng, CEO of the Huawei MEA intelligent computing department, told the Global Times, noting that Huawei will enhance cooperation with the UAE in various industries to produce greater value.