Moving on up

During the forum, the Center for Industrial Development and Environmental Governance of Tsinghua University and Nature Research released the 2021 Global Innovation Hubs Index. The index measures the innovation capability of 50 cities or city clusters worldwide against 32 metrics related to science and innovation.

The top five for this year are San Francisco-San Jose, New York, London, Beijing and Boston. San Francisco-San Jose and New York retained their top two positions on the list this year. London replaced Boston in the third place.

Beijing moved up the list from fifth place last year to fourth place this year. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, consisting of nine cities in the southern Guangdong province, Hong Kong and Macao, entered the rankings for the first time and achieved seventh place.

Of the 50 world-leading international centers for scientific and technological innovation, 23 are in Asia and nine are in China, the rankings showed.

New tech, products

One hundred new technologies and products were highlighted at an international technology trade fair, which was part of the ZGC Forum. They fell into the categories of next-generation information technology and integrated circuits, AI, intelligent manufacturing, biomedicine, high-end medical devices, new energy and new materials, energy conservation and environmental protection, and high-end equipment.

Among them was China's first and the world's largest hyper-scale pre-trained AI model known as Wudao, which was developed by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. It uses 175 trillion parameters and makes China a leader in this field, according to the organizers of the forum.

One of the new products highlighted was the Oxsight smart bionic glasses, which are the result of research that began at the University of Oxford in 2010. These glasses are designed for people with a visual impairment.