“
TRENDING
AI CAN DO THINGS THAT
WE CANNOT DO AS HUMANS.
Can you tell us about your operations
in Kuwait?
In Kuwait we have signed with Zain. I
think that was the first, or one of the first,
operators to sign with us in the region so it's
a flagship for us. As an operator or Digital
Transformation provider, Zain is a key player
in the Kuwaiti market and a key partner for
Huawei as well.
What can you tell us about Huawei's
performance in the last year?
If we look at our performance in the first
half of the year, we achieved US$59 billion
globally. This is a 23% year over year growth.
Could you give us some more
examples about how AI and IoT will
benefit key industries in Kuwait such
as the oil and gas industries?
AI can do things that we cannot do as
humans. For instance, if you need to monitor
a flare at an oil refinery, sending someone
Are there any specific examples you
can give?
to do this in tough weather conditions, or
even in normal conditions, is very risky, very
expensive and time consuming. If you have a pump in the oilfield and the
average temperature of one of these pumps
should be 40 degrees, and all of a sudden it
goes to 50 degrees, this is a signal that this
pump is going to fail.
Instead, if you use a drone with an intensive
camera that is trained to monitor the colour
and smell of the flare then this is saving a
lot of money and giving a lot of benefits to
the organisation. An AI solution will send you a report that this
pump is going to fail so you need to do the
right proactive maintenance for this pump
or order a new one or immediately replace it.
Otherwise it goes down.
We have seen a lot of intrusion happening,
especially in this part of the world, to
pipelines. If you lay a smart cable with
Machine Learning next to the pipeline and
it has cameras it will be able to detect any
intrusion and any leakage with an accuracy
of five metres. So with AI, operation and maintenance costs
will go down and availability for businesses
will go up.
There are a lot of applications that can
benefit different organisations, depending
on the industry, and there are a lot to come
because you have created the foundation
and the infrastructure.
I believe in the future we will have many more
applications and that will change our lives.
You have a number of applications for
different industries. This is the foundation of
the Digital Transformation and the Fourth
Industrial Revolution and this cannot happen
without 5G and AI.
What will the impact of 5G and IoT
be beyond telecommunications?
We've been talking about autonomous
cars for years but we couldn't implement
it, because of the relatively high latency
of the 4G or 3G. Now when we bring 5G
into play because of the very low latency
we can implement a technology like
autonomous cars.
With autonomous cars cameras need to
detect the different objects and avoid them
and decide what actions to take. So you have
Edge Computing in the car itself. In the past,
we weren't able to do this because we didn't
have the intelligence in the car.
You previously needed to capture the video,
send it to the command and control centre
or your data centre, process it and then send
the information back to the car so it could
make its decisions.
Today you don't need to do that. You have
enough intelligence in the car because
of Edge Computing and the AI chipset
integrated into it.
Alaa Elshimy, Managing Director, Enterprise
Business Group, Middle East, Huawei
www.intelligentcio.com
And then the car can take the decision on the
spot in the car itself, thanks to the technology.
So AI and 5G are two key enablers for the
transformation of this industry. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
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