(Xinhua) Wearing a pink hairpin, white T-shirt and pink shorts, a "girl" who looks three or four years old has grabbed the spotlight at the exhibition of the ongoing 2024 Zhongguancun Forum in Beijing. The "girl," named Tong Tong, or Little Girl in English, is an advanced virtual artificial intelligence (AI) avatar based on artificial general intelligence, according to Zhu Songchun, director of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, the developer of the product. In a video demonstration, after being programmed to a preference for liking things tidy, Tong Tong independentl ..read more

(China Daily) Eleven deals were signed at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Zhongguancun International Technology Trade Fair in Beijing on Thursday, marking a fruitful start to the global technology trading event. Of them, four technology transfer contracts were inked between universities and tech companies. They included assisted reproductive technology achievements in freezing and thawing solutions developed by Peking University Third Hospital; adaptive antenna array technology for satellite navigation signal reception and GNSS satellite navigation receiver technology developed by Beij ..read more

(Xinhua) Attending China's largest auto show, it is impossible to ignore the popularity of new energy vehicles (NEVs), which are changing the world's largest auto market at an intense pace. Organizers revealed that 117 new models will be making their debuts at the ongoing 18th Beijing International Automotive Exhibition (Auto China 2024), which runs through May 4. Overall, 278 NEVs are set to go on display, with Chinese NEVs being the superstars of the show. Their cutting-edge technologies, customer-friendly novelties and affordability have wowed visitors at the show and underlined how the C ..read more

(Xinhua) Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality plans to build more than 2,000 supercharging stations and more than 4,000 superchargers for new energy vehicles (NEVs) by 2025, said local authorities. By that time, the newly built public fast charging stations in the major urban areas of Chongqing should all be equipped with supercharging capacity, and the existing charging stations will be gradually transformed into supercharging ones, according to a document released by the municipal government. By 2025, the city is also expected to have 170 supercharging stations for NEVs in its expressw ..read more

(China Daily) Midea Group, one of the world's largest home appliance suppliers based in Foshan, Guangdong province, reported impressive growth and record profits in 2023, according to its annual financial report. The company achieved a total revenue of 373.7 billion yuan ($51.74 billion), representing a year-on-year increase of 8 percent, with the net profit attributable to shareholders increasing by 14 percent year-on-year to 33.7 billion yuan, marking the largest growth since 2019. Midea's business growth is attributed to its "Global Impact" strategy, which has resulted in overseas sa ..read more

(China Daily) China's overall fixed and mobile broadband speeds have increased by over 2.5 times in three years, according to a report released. The report, from the Broadband Development Alliance, showed that in the fourth quarter of last year, the national average fixed broadband download speed reached 83.8 megabits per second, up 17 percent year-on-year, while the average combined 4G/5G mobile broadband download speed exceeded 129 Mbps, up 32 percent year-on-year. Such speeds would enable the downloading of a 10 gigabyte 1080p high-definition movie in about 16 minutes on a fixed conn ..read more

(China Daily) As generative artificial intelligence technology is expected to be quickly applied to various industries, greater efforts are required to ensure the safe and responsible use of AI, especially given the rising priority accorded to data security governance, participants at the ongoing 2024 Zhongguancun Forum said. With the rapid development of AI, data security has gained in prominence as data serve not only as the basis for AI, but also as a core resource in the era of the digital economy, Guo Yike, a data scientist and the provost of the Hong Kong University of Science and ..read more

(Xinhua) The NeuCyber Array BMI System, a self-developed brain-machine interface (BMI) system from China, was unveiled at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Zhongguancun Forum (ZGC Forum) on Thursday in Beijing. At the forum, a video demonstration revealed a remarkable feat: a monkey with its hands restrained and soft electrode filaments implanted in its brain, controlled an isolated robotic arm and grasped a strawberry by simply using its "thoughts." The NeuCyber Array BMI System fills the gap in high-performance invasive brain-machine interface technology in China, said Luo Minmin, director ..read more

(China Daily) The Chang'e 6, China's next robotic spacecraft to the moon, has been scheduled to set out on its journey in the coming days, tasked with bringing back samples from the silver celestial body's little-known far side, according to the China National Space Administration. A Long March 5 carrier rocket, with the 8.2-metric-ton Chang'e 6 probe on top of it, was vertically moved on Saturday morning to its launch service tower at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, the administration said in a news release, noting the flight will take place in due course in early ..read more

(China Daily) China is likely to become the first country to bring Martian soil back to Earth in an ambitious science and engineering endeavor, according to a top space scientist. Wu Weiren, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a leading scientist at the China National Space Administration, said earlier this week in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, that the nation plans to collect Martian samples and then bring them back to Earth around 2030 via a historic mission named Tianwen 3, the third in China's interplanetary exploration schedule. "Based on the current progre ..read more