Feature: East China's Anhui Province innovates advanced technology

The high-tech development zones and the advanced technology research centers in east China's Anhui Province provide a variety of innovative technologies that can represent leaps in the fields of medicine, education, agriculture, communication and others.

The development of those innovative technologies make a real difference in the life of the Chinese people and even the rest of the world in general.

INNOVATIVE HIGH-TECHNOLOGY ON DISPLAY

Located in the provincial capital city of Hefei, the exhibition hall of the Institute of Advanced Technology of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) displays significant medical technologies, such as immunity improvement tablets for HIV patients, anti-diabetes pills to replace injections for diabetics, a medical scanner that can be used by dentists to scan jaws and screen display 3D pictures of the patient's teeth, an alternative for eye cornea that would put an end to cornea donations and many others.

"Instead of injection that hurts, diabetics can take the new pills that equally work. It's in the fifth clinical trial in the United States right now and I think it may be available in the market next year. For HIV tablets, we used to costly import them from Western countries. Now they are produced in China," said Miao Miao, administrative director of the Institute of Advanced Technology of the USTC.

The hall features some other advanced technologies that are based on the institute's research and carried out by related Chinese companies, such as a hotel service robot, which can be sent by receptionists to a guest's room carrying inside what the guest asks for, and a cell phone chip engraving device that used to be costly imported from Western countries.

The hall also showcases an agricultural machine that can refine harvested rice from straws, a super big high-definition screen of about 110 inches, the largest in China, and an electronic Mandarin-written book attached with a pen that pronounces the words it points to in Tibetan language. The hall also has two average-sized, well-shaped electronic cars with rechargeable batteries.

"We call the smaller one a 'small ant.' It's all made of aluminum to be very light. It can be charged for 10 hours per drive of 250 kilometers. The bigger one here that costs 20,000 U.S. dollars and goes 300 kilometers each drive has been available in the market since 2016," Miao said.

In a room on the second floor, Jia Jia, a robot that looks like a pretty Chinese young woman in traditional outfit, could communicate with visitors and answer their questions with a sense of humor.

HIGH-TECH ZONE DRIVES SMART SYSTEMS

Established in 1991 and ranking as one of the Top Ten high-tech zones in China, Hefei National New and High Technology Industrial Development Zone now covers an area of 128 square kilometers and hosts over 18,000 companies, 400 of which are foreign-invested businesses with more than 20 branches listed in stock markets abroad.

Fast-growing iFLYTEK Co. Ltd, a Chinese high-tech company, is among those cooperating with the Institute of Advanced Technology and contributing to high-tech innovation in China and worldwide.

Referring to itself as a pioneer in China's intelligent speech and artificial intelligence industry, the company provides new, highly-advanced, smart text-to-speech editing software based on voice recognition, free online applications for instant voice translation between Chinese and other languages, household control systems, car control appliances, smart educational systems and many others.

"Take for example our smart education systems. We provide them for free to rural areas that are short of teachers, like Tibet and Inner Mongolia, so that the students can study, learn and exercise (on) their own," Vivian Chen, iFLYTEK sales manager, told Xinhua.

Founded in 1999 and listed on Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2008, iFLYTEK's core innovative technological products are based on speech synthesis, speech recognition, image recognition, multilingual speech processing, machine translation, education evaluation, knowledge service, telecommunication service, smart automotive service and intelligent customer service.

"This is our smart medical system, a 3D CT scan of lungs that can detect cancer in its early stages," Vivian explained at the company's exhibition hall, noting that the device is still under development. Its data collection is also ongoing from hospitals in Beijing and other regions.

She added that the company's education systems have been exported to Hong Kong and Singapore, while the smart in-car systems that control vehicle appliances via speech and voice recognition are used by European car brands like Audi, Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes-Benz for their imported vehicles into China. "The same applies to Japanese cars like Nissan and Toyota. They are using our systems in China as well."

Wu Xiao, deputy director of Anhui's Information Office, said that the GDP of Hefei National New and High Technology Industrial Development Zone in 2016 amounted to 56.2 billion yuan (over 8 billion U.S. dollars), up 11 percent. He noted that the GDP of Anhui Province in 2016 reached 2.4 trillion yuan (about 348.5 billion U.S. dollars), adding that the 128-square-kilometer high-tech zone accommodates 200,000 out of Anhui's over 70 million people.

"Relying on innovation, Anhui Province is exerting great efforts to be a leader in the country regarding scientific innovation. Anhui now has five such zones and the one in Hefei is the largest. As for nationwide ranking, based on our research, Hefei National New and High Technology Industrial Development Zone ranked 7th in 2016," he said. Endi