The 5-day long 2019 Nanjing Tech Week that drew to a close yesterday, 30 June, found in it an unlikely highlight in the form of a collection of small exhibition booths that all hailed from Berlin, Germany.
Nanjing Tech Week saw a host of forums and activities take place across Nanjing. In the east of the city, Sophia the robot on stage was the main attraction at the Nanjing NEXT Summit that was part of the 2019 International AI and Robotics Innovation Eco-system Forum. In the west, the bulk of Tech Week’s major events were held at the Nanjing International Expo & Conference Centre. Yet, it was not the opening ceremony featuring keynote speeches from Nobel Prize winners nor the big-ticket Slush event which ended up as overall standout of the 2019 Nanjing Tech Week.
Instead, that title could be found in a corner of the expo centre next door, in the “Explore the W-Hole” expo, attended by exhibitors from all over the world; creations in booths from Norway and Estonia joined by the usual suspects Huawei and Startup Grind, all proudly showing off their new and innovative applications for artificial intelligence.
In reality, the highest concentration of innovation at Tech Week (in Chinese, it’s “Innovation Week”) was the small but colourful assembly of 12 exhibitors from the city of Berlin.
Among them, three in particular caught the attention of The Nanjinger, in the fields of fashion, music, and surprisingly, female fertility. One is the deserving winner of this publication’s Innovation Award.
Shortening the value chain of the fashion industry to one click is Yoona Tech (slogan: “Your Own AI Fashion Design”), an artificial intelligence-based B2B software solution that allows for the possibility of creating individual clothing designs based on personal sports data, while driving sustainability through automation of the design process.
Fashion always sits side by side with music, and so it was at Nanjing Tech Week, with Sonic Robots in the booth next door. In many ways, it makes a lot of sense to apply artificial intelligence to making music, but it was nevertheless both awe-inspiring and unnerving to witness it taking place in person, continuously. Sonic Robots uses intelligent control technology to simulate the performance of electronic music by human artists, by assembling mechanical and electronic components of music that are then controlled by artificial intelligence.
Lastly, perhaps most novel of all; The Nanjinger’s Innovation Award for the 2019 Nanjing Tech Week went to Ovy. Designed by women for women, the concept is essentially an app connected to a Bluetooth fertility thermometer, with which women can track their menstrual cycle and plan pregnancy. The technology predicts the optimal ovulation period by tracking the basal body temperature and detecting different body signals, such as premenstrual syndrome, cervix and mood fluctuations.
