May 31, 2021 Article blog
Just now, Alibaba Damo Academy released the top ten technology trends for 2021, which is the third time in the three years since the establishment of Damo Institute to release annual technology trends.
2020 is an extraordinary year, after the baptism of the epidemic, many industries restart the upward spiral, but the epidemic has not stopped the pace of scientific and technological progress, quantum computing, basic materials, biomedical and other fields of a series of major scientific and technological breakthroughs.
In the post-epidemic era, how the basic technology and technology industries will develop, Damo Institute for the science and technology industry to provide a new forecast.
The third-generation semiconductors, represented by GaN and Silicon Carbide (SiC), have excellent properties such as high temperature, high pressure, high frequency, high power and radiation resistance, but are limited by process, cost and other factors and have been limited to small-scale applications for many years.
In recent years, with the continuous breakthrough in material growth, device preparation and other technologies, the third generation of semiconductors, the cost-effective advantages are gradually emerging, and is opening up the application market: SiC components have been used as automotive inverters, GaN fast chargers are also on the market.
Over the next five years, electronic devices based on third-generation semiconductor materials will be widely used in 5G base stations, new energy vehicles, UHVs, data centers, and more.
2020 is the first year of post-"quantum hegemony", the world's investment in quantum computing continues to rise, technology and ecology flourish, a variety of platforms colorful.
This trend will continue to push up the concerns and expectations of society in 2021, quantum computing research needs to prove its practical value, the industry needs to focus on the "post-hegemony" era mission: collaborative innovation, solve numerous scientific and engineering problems, for the early arrival of quantum error correction and practical advantages of the two milestones laid the foundation.
Flexible electronics refer to electronic devices that maintain their original performance after changing shapes such as twisting, folding and stretching, and can be used as wearable devices, electronic skins, flexible displays, etc.
The main bottleneck in the development of flexible electronics is the material - the current flexible material, or "flexible" deficiency is easy to fail, or electrical performance is far less than "hard" silicon-based electrons.
In recent years, technological breakthroughs in carbon-based materials have provided better material choices for flexible electrons: the quality of carbon nanotubes, a carbon-based flexible material, has met the requirements for the preparation of large-scale integrated circuits, and the circuits prepared on this material perform more than silicon-based circuits of the same size, while large-area preparation of graphene, another carbon-based flexible material, has also been achieved.
AI has been widely used in medical imaging, medical records management and other auxiliary diagnostic scenarios, but AI in vaccine research and clinical research is still in the exploration stage.
With the iteration of new AI algorithms and breakthroughs in computing power, AI will effectively solve the problems of long vaccine/drug development cycles and high cost, such as improving the efficiency of compound screening, building disease models, finding new targets, finding pilot compounds and optimizing pilot drugs.
The combination of AI with vaccine and drug clinical research can reduce duplication of effort and time consumption, improve research and development efficiency, and greatly promote the inclusiveness of healthcare services and drugs.
Brain-computer interface is the key core technology of next-generation computer interaction and human-machine hybrid intelligence. Brain-computer interface has played an important supporting and promoting role in the development of neuroengineering, helping human beings to further analyze the working principle of the human brain from a higher dimensional space.
Brain-computer interfaces, a new technology that explores the brain's ability to communicate with external devices and control machines with brain power. For example, in the control of the robotic arm and other aspects to help improve the application accuracy, will be clear-headed, sound thinking, but the mouth can not speak, hands can not move patients to provide accurate rehabilitation services.
With the development of cloud computing and the continuous exponential growth of data scale, traditional data processing faces great challenges such as high storage cost, complex cluster management and diversity of computing tasks.
Therefore, the automatic optimization of data management system through intelligent methods has become an inevitable choice for the future development of data processing.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning methods are gradually widely used in intelligent hot and cold data layering, anomaly detection, intelligent modeling, resource mobilization, parameter tuning, pressure measurement generation, index recommendation and other fields, effectively reduce the data calculation, processing, storage, operation and maintenance of the management costs, to achieve the data management system "autonomy and self-evolution."
In traditional IT development environments, with long product development cycles and low research and development performance, cloud-native architectures take full advantage of the distributed, scalable, and flexible nature of cloud computing to more efficiently apply and manage heterogeneous hardware and cloud computing resources in environments. With methodological toolsets, best practices, and product technologies, developers can focus on the application development process itself.
In the future, chips, development platforms, applications, and even computers will be born on the cloud, which will make the infrastructure layers of networks, servers, operating systems and so on highly abstract, reduce computing costs, improve iteration efficiency, significantly reduce the threshold for cloud computing use, and expand the boundaries of technology applications.
The development of traditional agricultural industry has the bottleneck problem of low utilization rate of land resources and disjointed link from production to retail. Digital technologies, represented by the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, etc., are deeply integrating with the agricultural industry to open up the entire link process of the agricultural industry.
Combined with the next generation of sensor technology, farmland ground data information can be obtained and perceived in real time, and rely on big data analysis and artificial intelligence technology to quickly process large quantities of agricultural data in the field, crop monitoring, fine breeding and environmental resources on demand allocation.
At the same time, through the application of 5G, Internet of Things, blockchain and other technologies, to ensure the logistics and transportation of agricultural products in the control and traceability, to ensure the overall supply chain process of agricultural products safe and reliable. Agriculture will bid farewell to "by the sky" to eat, into the era of intelligent agriculture.
Limited by such factors as high implementation cost and complexity, difficult access to supply-side data, and inadequate overall ecology, the current industrial intelligence is still mainly designed to solve the need for fragmentation.
The resilience shown by the digital economy in the epidemic, so that enterprises pay more attention to the value of industrial intelligence, coupled with the popularization of digital technology, investment in new infrastructure, these factors will jointly promote industrial intelligence from a single point of intelligence to global intelligence.
In particular, automotive, consumer electronics, brand apparel, steel, cement, chemical industry and other manufacturing industries with a good information base, through the supply chain, production, assets, logistics, sales and other links, including enterprise production decision-making closed-loop global intelligent application, will emerge on a large scale.
Over the past decade, smart cities have effectively improved the level of urban governance through digital means. However, in the prevention and control of the new crown epidemic, smart cities have exposed new problems, especially due to the "heavy construction of light operation" caused by the lack of business applications.
In this context, the future of the city needs to invigorate data resources through the operation center to promote the globalization, refinement and real-time management and services.
The growing maturity and popularity of AIoT technology and advances in spatial computing will further enhance the intellectualization of operations centers, using cities as a unified system and providing overall intelligent governance capabilities on a digital twin basis, thus becoming the digital infrastructure of the cities of the future.
- This article is reproduced and read the original text
- Author: Alibaba Cloud