What earth-shaking changes will happen to AIoT, the hottest technology in 2018?

• In September 1985, Peter T. Lewis first proposed the concept of "Internet of Things" in a speech at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

• In 1995, Bill Gates mentioned the Internet in his new book "The Road Ahead", which caused widespread discussion.

• In 1998, MIT proposed the Internet of Things concept, which was then called the EPC system.

• In 1999, Auto-ID proposed the concept of the Internet of Things based on object coding (RFID) technology.

• On November 17, 2005, at the World Information Summit, the International Telecommunication Union released the "ITU Internet Report 2005: Internet of Things", which pointed out the advent of the "Internet of Things" era.

The thirty years since the development of the Internet of Things have also been the thirty years of rapid development of the Internet. Especially in the decade from 2005 to 2015, the concept of the Internet of Things was mentioned more frequently. The popularization and rapid development of the Internet and the transformation of mobile Internet have brought the concept of the Internet of Things to unprecedented new heights.

Before 2012, in many people’s minds, the Internet of Things seemed to be just an accessory to the development of the Internet. Compared with the Internet, PC, and even mobile Internet, which were the “darlings” of the same era, the Internet of Things was really inconspicuous. At least in terms of the frequency and popularity of appearing in newspapers, it was an “unknown” word.

Looking back now, this situation was inevitable. After all, the development of the Internet/mobile Internet was still in its rising stage at that time. Many IoT-related applications mentioned at that time were actually icing on the cake. There was no actual rigid demand. "Smart devices" were also in their infancy, and the general public's understanding of smart devices was limited to consumer products such as "Nokia phones with Symbian systems."

It is precisely because of insufficient demand that it is not taken seriously in business. Although the capital market is optimistic about this aspect, it has not invested too much energy in it.

From the perspective of the "trend", the turning point was 2012.

This year, a large amount of hot money poured out of the real estate market (the real data and specific reasons can no longer be verified), and urgently needed to be invested in the next hot spot.

At that time, traditional Internet applications had become a red ocean of competition. The era was transitioning from the Internet to the mobile Internet. The smartphone market was surging, which led to a large number of mobile Internet applications. In this process, people discovered that smartphones, as terminal devices, could become new IoT entrances.

It was during this period of rapid development of smartphones that the concept of IoT was frequently mentioned, giving rise to a wave of "smart hardware" trends. This trend began to explode around 2014, and "smart hardware" became the focus of almost all capital.

But at this time, the development of the Internet of Things, with smart hardware as its core, is relatively chaotic and does not conform to normal development logic.

On the one hand, many entrepreneurs positioned their IoT products as "mobile app + hardware". No matter what hardware it was, it had to be connected to a mobile phone to use. As a result, a large number of useless products appeared at the time, such as "smart water cups". The product ecosystem was not perfect enough, and one hundred products might require users to download one hundred apps.

On the other hand, when the opportunity comes, people are idle and many investors and entrepreneurs are keen to make a quick buck, but lack consideration for the product itself and user needs.

Due to objective factors such as imperfect technology and the underdeveloped IoT ecosystem, the trend of smart hardware is gradually fading.

Since 2016, the focus of the technology industry has shifted from smart hardware to multiple "hot spots" such as AI and blockchain, and the Internet of Things has become an outdated concept.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, the seemingly "outdated" concept of IoT has quietly risen again and has been mentioned again as a core strategy by many giants, becoming a darling again.

In March this year, at the 2018 Yunqi Conference Shenzhen Summit which opened in Shenzhen, Alibaba Group Senior Vice President and Alibaba Cloud President Hu Xiaoming announced that Alibaba will fully enter the field of Internet of Things. IoT is the new main track of Alibaba Group after e-commerce, finance, logistics and cloud computing, and plans to connect 10 billion devices in the next five years.

This is the most important event in the IoT industry this year. The attention of the giants also proves to a certain extent that the IoT industry has entered a mature development stage. At this time, IoT is no longer the "Internet of Everything". Thanks to the rapid development of technologies such as AI, big data, and cloud computing, IoT has been reborn as "Intelligent Connection of Everything". At the 2018 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba also proposed the three pillars of the Intelligent Connection of Everything: IoT, AI, and cloud computing. In the new IoT era, Alibaba wants to play the role of a builder of IoT infrastructure, providing the industry with an open and convenient IoT connection platform and powerful AI capabilities. The next goal of Alibaba is to achieve collaborative computing among cloud, edge, and end.

From the perspective of outsiders, although the entry of giants like Alibaba has brought new vitality to the industry, the infrastructure built by Alibaba is still unfamiliar and distant to the general public.

The first element for ordinary people to feel the intelligent connection of all things is to actually see smart products. These smart products need to be based on the "smart home" as the entry point.

In addition to Xiaomi, the trend of traditional home appliance giants for the intelligent connection of all things has also quietly emerged. In the past year, Leifeng.com's reports on smart homes show that Haier and other domestic home appliance giants have invested a lot in smart linkage products. Haier Home Appliance Group CTO and Vice President Zhao Feng has repeatedly stated in public that although artificial intelligence has given the IoT industry a new development path, there are still three major pain points in the development of the industry: single products are not complete sets, pseudo-intelligence is not interoperable, and the experience is poor and not interactive. The evolution of smart homes is to start from artificial intelligence and evolve to whole-house intelligence. Previously, everyone focused on "single product intelligence", but now linkage is needed.

As a leader in home appliances, Haier also launched its own smart home UHomeOS operating system in this wave of evolution, working hard to solve AIoT. At present, other traditional home appliance giants have also begun to realize this and are quickly following suit.

In addition to traditional home appliance giants, a new generation of forces is also rising.

Xiaomi officially launched its IoT strategy in 2015 and released its first Xiaomi smart module. In just three years, it has become one of the world's largest smart hardware IoT open platforms.

According to public data, as of November 5, 2017, Xiaomi's IoT platform has more than 85 million connected devices and more than 10 million active devices per day. Adhering to the open strategy, Xiaomi has reached cooperation with more than 400 related hardware manufacturers such as Siemens, Philips, and Supor. Internally, Xiaomi's own ecological chain companies such as ZMI, Huami, Zhimi, and Ninebot have also joined the ranks of unicorns.

The integration and control linkage of its own products and third-party brands have greatly lowered the threshold for users to independently build a complete set of smart home products.

The intelligent connection of all things is inevitably inseparable from intelligent interaction methods, which also provides great opportunities for some technology manufacturers.

At present, voice interaction is the most popular control interaction method for intelligent terminals, and it also has the greatest potential in the future. From the popularity of Amazon's Echo speakers, we can see that ordinary users are very satisfied with the convenience of voice interaction. In China, voice interaction technology providers such as iFlytek have provided technical bonuses for the new era of intelligent connection. In addition, in order to seize this wave of opportunities, iFlytek has also launched hardware-related businesses in the matter of "entrance".

From the infrastructure and hardware layout of the giants to the breakthroughs and improvements in technology, people have a new understanding of the concept of the Internet of Everything, and the Internet of Everything has also ushered in new opportunities: on the one hand, giant companies have realized that the role they play in this wave of IoT is crucial to their future development; on the other hand, the development of the digital electronics market such as smartphones has tended to stagnate, and many giant technology companies have placed part of their growth expectations on the big event of IoT.

In summary, the IoT industry has entered a new stage of development. It is no longer an appendage of the Internet, but will become something ubiquitous like "water and electricity" in the future. From household appliances in people's daily lives to robots and military equipment in industrial manufacturing, the Internet of Things will play a vital role.

A few years ago, people always said that IoT was the "Next Big Thing" in the technology industry, but then the IoT industry "declined" and no one mentioned it anymore. Now everything is moving in a positive direction, and the Internet of Things is returning to the stage with smarter attributes, and it is really about to become the "Next Big Thing".

Although there has been some improvement, there is still a long way to go, especially in the IoT industry, which is an industry where it is almost impossible for one company to dominate and take charge of everything. So what is the current development status of the IoT industry, and what will be the future development trend of the IoT industry?

These questions will be answered at the CCF-GAIR 2018 conference.

The 3rd CCF-GAIR Global Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Summit, hosted by the China Computer Federation (CCF) and co-organized by Leiphone.com (official account: Leiphone.com) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, will be held from June 29 to July 1, 2018 at the JW Marriott Hotel Qianhai, Bao'an District, Shenzhen. There will be 1 main venue and 11 special sessions (bionic robot session, robot industry application session, CV session, smart security session, financial technology session, autonomous driving session, NLP session, AI+ session, AI chip session, IoT session, investor session), aiming to present more forward-looking and practical conference content from multiple dimensions of industry, academia and research.

Compared with the previous two conferences, the IoT session is a brand new one and one of the main areas that Leiphone.com will follow up on. We attach great importance to it.

In the IoT special session, we have invited Haier Home Appliances Group CTO and Vice President Zhao Feng to give a keynote speech. In addition, Alibaba, Xiaomi, Ecovacs and other companies that will shine in the new IoT era will also gather in this special session to share the current status and future of the IoT industry with participants from multiple aspects such as products, technology, and ecology. The tentative agenda is as follows:

Conference report: Zhao Feng, CTO and Vice President of Haier Home Appliance Group, former Executive Vice President of Microsoft Research Asia

Keynote Speech: Cui Baoqiu, Vice President of Xiaomi Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Platform, Chief Architect of Xiaomi

Keynote Speech: Zhang Chen, General Manager of Intelligent Hardware Division, Consumer Business Group, iFLYTEK

Keynote Speech: Long Yimin, Senior Technical Expert, Alibaba Cloud IoT Division

Roundtable: Liu Zhenyu, CEO of Zhiqu Technology

Zhang Faen CTO of AInnovation

…

Some of the confirmed speakers for CCF-GAIR 2018 (listed in no particular order)

See you in Shenzhen on July 1st to witness a new era of IoT together.