Qualcomm AI Application Innovation Competition launched to promote the development of intelligent industry in the 5G era

Qualcomm announced that the "2021 Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Application Innovation Competition" was officially launched on March 24, hosted by Qualcomm Technologies, Qualcomm Ventures, and co-organized by Extreme Vision, Xiaomi, Thundersoft, and CSDN, with TensorFlow Lite as the open source technology partner. Relying on the successful holding of the first "Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Application Innovation Competition" in 2020, this competition will integrate terminal-side artificial intelligence (AI) and edge cloud technology, and work with AI industry chain partners to provide mobile developers and industry users focusing on Android application development and intelligent edge with a platform to showcase their creativity and achievements, and promote many innovative applications enabled by AI technology in the 5G era. The competition will provide developers with a complete series of end-to-end artificial intelligence application development and application landing support systems through competition platforms, technical training, expert Q&A, etc., to help developers create high-quality, low-cost, commercializable high-quality AI applications in a shorter time. The Qualcomm Neural Network Processing SDK and Qualcomm AI Engine Direct architecture used in the competition will provide developers with an end-to-end solution, allowing algorithm models to run on any device that supports the Qualcomm Snapdragon™ mobile platform that supports the Qualcomm AI Engine. This will not only simplify and accelerate the development of AI applications, but also better support the implementation of innovative AI applications.

"We are entering a new era of intelligent cloud connectivity driven by AI and 5G," said Gang Sun, vice president of product marketing at Qualcomm Technologies. "5G and AI combined with edge cloud will drive the emergence of more powerful and potential applications, transforming many segments and industries. Qualcomm Technologies' AI engine delivers industry-leading AI performance-to-power ratio and is now expanding to the company's product portfolio in multiple areas, including mobile terminals, cloud, computing devices, IoT and automotive. Qualcomm Technologies has always been committed to collaborating, innovating and creating new technologies in the global ecosystem, and we are very proud to work with many leading companies in China and around the world to use 5G and AI to drive innovation and growth. The '2021 Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Application Innovation Competition' provides a good opportunity to connect developers and application scenarios, which will further unleash the full potential of AI in the cloud, edge and terminal in the 5G era. We are very excited about this."

Liu Ruoshui, partner of Jishijue, said: "With the strong support of Qualcomm's platform solution ecosystem program, our software and application ecosystem members can pre-integrate and optimize their solutions with our AI products, allowing our OEM manufacturers to create the best user experience and differentiated functions. Jishijue, as the first artificial intelligence visual algorithm mall in China, is honored to co-organize this competition with Qualcomm Technologies. Jishijue's Jishishi platform will serve as the competition technology platform for this competition. In this competition, contestants will achieve a one-stop competition experience such as online coding training, model deployment on mobile terminals based on Snapdragon mobile platforms, and mobile cloud testing and verification in the competition environment provided by Jishishi platform, solving engineering problems for contestants and truly realizing a barrier-free online algorithm development experience throughout the process. The developer ecosystem created by Jishishi platform affects nearly 150,000+ algorithm developers. We believe that with the strong hardware strength and influence of Qualcomm Technologies, the implementation of AI algorithms will be accelerated in the future, and more excellent edge algorithm applications will be discovered."

Zou Pengcheng, Chief Technology Officer of Thundersoft Software Co., Ltd., said: "As a world-leading provider of intelligent operating system products and technologies, Thundersoft is pleased to once again support the competition with its technological advantages. In this competition, Thundersoft provides 45Lab, an embedded device cloud service platform designed for developers and development teams. Based on this platform, we will open up remote access rights to Xiaomi 11 and Thundercomm AIKit to contestants, so as to provide contestants with powerful cloud computing support while helping developers achieve a barrier-free development competition experience. Finally, I wish this competition a complete success."

Jiang Tao, founder and chairman of CSDN and founding partner of Geekbang Venture Capital, said: "As a professional developer community in China, CSDN has become an important platform for Chinese developers to learn and exchange AI technology applications in the past 10 years. In the AI ​​era, developers play a very important role in promoting the development of the entire industry. We look forward to all developers developing more innovative and practical AI applications in this competition, and jointly leading China's AI to open a new chapter."

Li Shuangfeng, head of TensorFlow China R&D, said: "I am very happy that TensorFlow Lite has participated in the Qualcomm AI Application Innovation Competition as an open source technology partner to help participants demonstrate the infinite possibilities of edge AI. TensorFlow Lite has been deployed on more than billions of devices worldwide, supporting a variety of applications such as image, voice, and natural language processing. It is closely integrated with Qualcomm Technologies' AI software stack and hardware, and is committed to promoting the development of the edge AI software ecosystem and supporting developers to create more exciting applications. Finally, I wish the developers to achieve excellent results and win the grand prize in this competition, and I wish this event a complete success."

This year's competition has two tracks - the application track and the innovation track. The application track focuses on mobile terminals and AIoT terminals, and participants can choose their own topics to create. The innovation track is specifically for mobile terminals, and will set up four groups: expression recognition, crop pest and disease recognition, garbage classification, and hand-painted image recognition. Participants can complete online algorithm development through the competition platform and use Qualcomm Neural Network Processing Engine SDK for model conversion.

Participants can use two Snapdragon-powered competition development machine environments to develop applications. The development machine hardware includes the Xiaomi 11 smartphone equipped with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 888 5G mobile platform, and the Thundercomm TurboX AI KIT based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series mobile platform. The new Qualcomm Spectra™  580 ISP integrated in the Snapdragon 888 supports a processing speed of 2.7 billion pixels per second, and the newly designed sixth-generation Qualcomm AI engine provides a powerful computing power of 26 TOPS per second, providing strong support for the combination of mobile AI and professional imaging. Thundercomm TurboX AI KIT is a high-performance embedded development device for intelligent vision that can support the development of AI applications in fields such as robotics, virtual reality/augmented reality, smart cameras, automobiles, smart retail, smart factories, smart homes, and smart cities.