Tech

Alibaba Cloud Integrates Tongyi Qianwen into AI Assistant to Enhance Productivity

Guangzhou, China, June 1, 2023 – Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, announced today that its large language model (LLM), Tongyi Qianwen, has been integrated into its intelligent assistant named Tingwu. The assistant excels at converting speech and videos to text in real-time, aiming to enhance both personal and workplace productivity.

The recently launched LLM enables Tingwu to comprehend and analyze multimedia content with high levels of accuracy and efficiency, such as generating summary text from video and audio files, capturing key talking points for each speaker, and creating a timeline of multimedia files with a summary of each section.

The LLM-powered Tingwu, called “Tongyi Tingwu”, is now available for public beta testing. Tongyi Tingwu will also be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba’s digital collaboration workplace and application development platform, supporting users’ AI demands at work. In addition to improving workplace efficiency, Tongyi Tingwu can also be used across various multimedia platforms, responding to the growing needs for faster and easier knowledge sharing in online education, training, interviews, livestreaming, podcasts, and short-form videos.

“We live at a time when a growing amount of video and audio content is being consumed in various formats every day. In line with this, Tongyi Tingwu aims to use the large language model to facilitate faster and better comprehension and easier sharing of multimedia content,” said Jingren Zhou, CTO of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “As we gradually integrate the Tongyi Qianwen model into our products and services, we hope users can reap the benefits from these compelling AI innovations for their work, study, play and interaction with each other.”

By leveraging proprietary audio and video models developed by Alibaba’s research institute DAMO – including the self-developed speech recognition model Paraformer and speaker verification model CAM++, along with the newly-released LLM Tongyi Qianwen – Tingwu can transcribe video and audio files with higher accuracy while enabling numerous AI-powered features. Additional AI features offered by Tongyi Tingwu will be available later this year. These features include automatically compiling text answers to address user queries across audio/video files, generating a summary based on PowerPoint slides extracted from videos, and providing real-time translation between English and Chinese for multimedia content with Tingwu as a Chrome plugin.

General public can access the upgraded AI-powered assistant online (tingwu.aliyun.com) starting from today to experience its capabilities through their Alibaba Cloud accounts and receive free transcription services as part of an open trial.

Alibaba Cloud unveiled Tongyi Qianwen on April 11, which is scheduled to be integrated across Alibaba’s various businesses to improve the user experience in the near future. The company’s customers and developers will have access to the model to create customized AI features in a cost-effective manner, too.

The cloud pioneer also launched the “Tongyi Qianwen Partnership Program,” aiming to co-create large language models tailored for different industries with partners across sectors, including petrochemicals, electricity, transportation, hospitality, enterprise services, telecommunications and finance.

Tech

Swisscom Deploys Netcracker Network Domain Orchestration for IP Transport Automation

Netcracker Technology announced today that its long-standing customer Swisscom has deployed Netcracker’s Network Domain
Orchestration (NDO) solution to modernize the IT landscape of the operator’s new terabit IP transport aggregation network (TITAN). This initiative is part of a large-scale OSS transformation program at Swisscom to create a more flexible, future-proof and automated modern digital architecture with lower operational costs. Netcracker NDO provides a unifying automation solution incorporating real-time and federated inventory for end-to-end visibility and a single source of truth. It also provides efficient network planning and design that speeds up network rollouts and a DevOps-based design studio to rapidly
onboard new devices using vendor-agnostic resource modelling. The solution enables highly automated processes, from device onboarding to rollout planning, physical and logical discovery and reconciliation, and works with any mix of transport network vendors. The cloud-native solution allows Swisscom to share TITAN inventory data in real-time – using open APIs – with multiple external systems using state-of-the-art communication techniques. The deployment of NDO will give Swisscom the ability to go to market more quickly, reduce costs for network rollout, development and operations and improve the autonomy of its teams.
“We have worked very closely with Netcracker over the years and value our partnership, which has led to business success in different areas,” said Bram Van der Zwet, Lead Architect, Networks & Infrastructure at Swisscom. “The automation of our new IP transport network is a major undertaking that will result in a number of improvements across the network and IT, and
we are happy to have Netcracker alongside us once again.” “Swisscom is one of the most innovative operators in Europe, and we are very proud of the confidence they have placed in us to be part of their new IP transport network,” said Benedetto
Spaziani, GM at Netcracker. “With our NDO solution, we look forward to helping Swisscom deliver positive outcomes for the business as it continues to revolutionize the market.”

Tech

4th cycle of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award launched

HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the UAE Water Aid Foundation (Suqia
UAE), has launched the 4th cycle of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Water Award. With total prizes of
USD 1 million, the Award aims to recognise organisations, research centres, and innovators who develop innovative
technologies and prototypes to produce, distribute, desalinate, and purify water using renewable energy. The aim is to
find solutions to the water scarcity challenge facing underprivileged and afflicted communities around the world.
In his speech during an event held by Suqia UAE at Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)’s stand at COP28.
Al Tayer said that the Award enhances the UAE’s efforts in global humanitarian work by encouraging and recognising
organisations, individuals, and innovators who develop practical and sustainable solutions for the challenges of water
scarcity using renewable energy. This follows the UAE’s approach of actively contributing to providing solutions to the
challenges facing the world and helping less developed societies to confront challenges and achieve sustainable
development.
Al Tayer commended the level of interest and great turnout that the Award garnered, as well as the quality of
innovations presented by companies, research centres, institutions, and innovators. The previous cycle received entries
from 56 countries around the world. Over the past 3 cycles of the award, 31 winners from 22 countries were rewarded for
their innovative projects in water desalination and purification using renewable energy sources, including solar, wind,
biomass, hydropower, osmotic power, and geothermal technologies.
The Award has four categories: the Innovative Projects Award, which includes the Large Projects Award and the Small
Projects Award; the Innovative Research and Development Award, which includes the National Institutions Award and
the International Institutions Award; the Innovative Individual Award, which includes the Distinguished Research Award
and the Youth Award; and the Innovative Crisis Solutions Award.
=Suqia UAE has urged organisations, companies, research centres, innovators, and youth worldwide to participate in the
4th cycle of the Award. Applications will be received until 30 April 2024 at www.mbrwateraward.ae/awards

Tech

Vertiv Acquisition of CoolTera Ltd. Boosts Liquid Cooling Portfolio

VRT), a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, today announced that subsidiaries of the company have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire all of the shares of CoolTera Ltd. (CoolTera), a provider of coolant distribution infrastructure for data center liquid cooling technology and certain assets, including certain contracts,
patents, trademarks, and intellectual property from an affiliate of CoolTera.

Founded in 2016 and based in the UK, CoolTera provides liquid cooling infrastructure solutions, and
designs and manufactures coolant distribution units (CDU), secondary fluid networks (SFN), and
manifolds for data center liquid cooling solutions. CoolTera and Vertiv have been technology partners for
three years with multiple global deployments to data centers and super compute systems. The
acquisition of CoolTera brings advanced cooling technology, deep domain expertise, controls and
systems, and manufacturing and testing for high density compute cooling requirements to Vertiv’s
already robust thermal management portfolio, as well as key industry partnerships already in place
across the ecosystem for such applications. CoolTera has a proven track record of engineering
excellence and strong customer service supported by a team of highly qualified, proven liquid cooling
engineers.

“This bolt-on technology acquisition is consistent with our long-term strategic vision for value creation,
and further strengthens our expertise in high-density cooling solutions,” said Giordano Albertazzi, Chief
Executive Officer, Vertiv. “And while the purchase price is not material to Vertiv, the acquisition is
essential to further reinforce our liquid cooling portfolio, enhancing our ability to serve the needs of our
global data center customers and strengthening our position and capabilities to support the needs of AI
at scale.”

“It was a logical decision to join the Vertiv family,” said Mark Luxford, CoolTera’s Managing Director. “We
are excited to join the leader in data center thermal management. Vertiv has demonstrated the ability to
scale technologies at a pace that is needed for AI deployment. We look forward to working as a team to
deliver next generation liquid cooling technologies at the scale the industry requires. Vertiv is well-
positioned to support the industry growth.”