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ASTRI Showcases Latest Technologies at InnoCarnival

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Promoting Innovation Culture and Leading Technological Advancements

HONG KONG, Oct. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) showcases a range of its pioneering technologies at InnoCarnival, enhancing public awareness on innovation and technology (I&T). The nine-day exhibition, which opens today at the Hong Kong Science Park, is organised by the Innovation and Technology Commission.

“ASTRI actively supports the HKSAR Government’s policy to advance I&T and develop New Quality Productive Forces. Through our annual participation in the InnoCarnival, we showcase various homegrown cutting-edge technologies, allowing public to experience firsthand the conveniences brought by smart city technologies as well as how smart manufacturing solutions drives digital transformation and new industrialisation,” said Ir Sunny Lee, Chairman of ASTRI.

Visitors to ASTRI’s state-of-the-art booth can test drive a Formula A virtual racing car; utilise an internationally awarded gemstone identifier to distinguish real diamonds from imitations; embark on a treasure hunt in a complete darkness with a robotic guide dog; and wear an optical see-through head-mounted display (HMD) to participate in virtual pharmacy interactive game as a pharmacist. Through these engaging experiences, visitors can explore the practical application of technologies such as cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X), artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, as well as digital and physical twins in daily life.

The InnoCarnival is one of the events celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.  Under the theme “Let’s Sail with Innovation and Technology”, the carnival aims to promote I&T culture, nurture the young people’s interest in I&T, and attract more I&T talent in the long term. ASTRI’s booth (C-11 at Yellow Zone) is located on the first floor of 12W, Science Park, presenting diverse innovations:

Formula A
Visitors can drive virtual race cars to experience smart mobility and C-V2X technology. Vehicles travel along a cross-border route between Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area (Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge), utilising real-time traffic monitoring platforms, traffic simulation platforms, and large traffic model technology to enhance road safety and improve traffic management, creating a safer and more efficient innovative transportation solution for future cities.

Gemstone “EYE”-dentification
ASTRI’s “Gemstone Eye: Apparatus for Gemstones Identification” was awarded the “Gold Medal with Congratulations of Jury” at the 49th International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva. This automated device conducts multiple tests within a minute, swiftly distinguishing natural diamonds from laboratory-synthetic diamonds and other gemstones. Gemstone identification is now more professional, straightforward, and efficient with ASTRI’s technology.

Guide Dog – Little A 
ASTRI is developing technology that interprets human interaction and environments visually through the “Detection of Human Interaction for Visually Impaired People by Autonomous Robot.” This technology aims to achieve object recognition similar to a guide dog, assisting visually impaired individuals in navigating their surroundings, avoiding obstacles and hazards, and enhancing their independence in daily life.

My Pharmacy Simulator 
Leveraging ASTRI’s patented display and sensing technology, ASTRI has developed an all-in-one optical see-through HMD based on a single combiner off-axis optical design. This cutting-edge solution seamlessly integrates the user’s experience with both the real world and virtual environments, effectively bridging the gap to the metaverse while prioritising user comfort and operational efficiency. ASTRI’s innovative solution has already been implemented in local public hospital pharmacies to assist in drug recognition and replenishment processes.

Can You Truly Trust Your Vision?
In extreme weather or lightless environments, visibility diminishes, making it unreliable to depend solely on human vision for judgments. To address this challenge, ASTRI has developed ‘Sensor Fusion’ – an advanced multiple-modality image fusion solution. By inputting regular photos, infrared thermal imaging, and night vision images into a novel diffusion neural network, noise is removed and images are merged to generate stable and enhanced fusion images. This technology can improve visualisation and object recognition capability of surveillance and autonomous guided vehicles.

Integrating Factory Management with Smart Manufacturing
Smart manufacturing fundamentally changes traditional manufacturing thinking, enabling communication between machines, and between machines and humans. It shifts towards highly customised, intelligent, and service-oriented business models that can quickly respond to market changes. The digital twin technology developed by ASTRI allows the assembly process to be designed, optimised, and verified before actual deployment, whilst the physical twin enables real robots and equipment to operate according to the optimised plan.

Avatar Creators
With ASTRI-developed computing vision and generative AI technologies, videos of virtual avatars with speech and head animation can be generated. This technology enables fully automated content creation without the need for professional editing or production skills, making it easier to generate impressive videos with virtual characters.

Additionally, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Innovation, Technology and Industry Bureau and ASTRI organise public guided tours at the ASTRI Technovation Centre today, showcasing Hong Kong’s I&T achievements, and highlighting the advancements and prospects in developing New Quality Productive Forces and new industrialisation.

ASTRI has arranged a variety of games and tech showcases to deepen visitors’ understanding of its core technologies and applications. These include 5G time-sensitive network technology, 3D integrated circuit and their application in smart cities, radio conversation analysis system, C-V2X virtual autonomous driving game, smart dispensing cabinets, tower crane model for testing construction safety technology, and coaxial confocal 3D line scanning system.

 

 

About ASTRI

Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI) was founded by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 2000 with the mission of enhancing Hong Kong’s competitiveness through applied research. ASTRI’s core R&D competence in various areas is grouped under five Technology Divisions: Advanced Electronic Components and Systems; Artificial Intelligence and Trust Technologies; Communications Technologies; Innovative Mind, and IoT Sensing and AI Technologies. It is applied across six core areas which are Smart City, Financial Technologies, New-Industrialisation and Intelligent Manufacturing, Digital Health, Application Specific Integrated Circuits and Metaverse.

Over the years, ASTRI has nurtured a pool of research, I&T talents and received numerous international awards for its pioneering innovations as well as outstanding business and community contributions. ASTRI has transferred 1,500 technologies to the industry and has been granted over 1,100 patents in the Mainland, the United States, and other countries. For further information, please visit www.astri.org.

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SOURCE Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute (ASTRI)

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OceanBase Receives Honorable Mention for the Second Consecutive Year in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ Report

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SINGAPORE, Dec. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — OceanBase has once again been named as Honorable Mention in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (Cloud DBMS), marking the second consecutive year it has received this recognition.

OceanBase offers scalable distributed database for data-intensive transactional and real-time operational analytics workloads, with ultra-fast performance and high compatibility across major global cloud infrastructures, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. Operating across more than 30 regions in Asia, Europe, and America, OceanBase has already served over 2,000 customers, such as SAIC Volkswagen, DiDi Global, vivo, Pop Mart, Haidilao, Kwai, Trip.com, GCash, DANA, and PalmPay.

Over the past year, OceanBase has made significant strides in the Southeast Asian market. In December 2024, Starpay, a leading financial technology company in the Philippines, announced a partnership with OceanBase to leverage its cutting-edge distributed database solutions.

OceanBase hosted the inaugural OceanBase INFINITY tech conference in Jakarta, Indonesia in June 2024. During the event, the company announced strategic partnerships with leading local resellers to better serve customers in the Indonesian market.

According to Gartner’s latest DBMS market data in the Magic Quadrant, “the overall database management system market grew by 13.4% in 2023, reaching $103.2 billion“, up from $91 billion in 2022. The DBMS segment remains one of the fastest-growing areas within the software market, alongside analytic platforms, networking software, and supply chain management software.

In May 2024, OceanBase was also recognized as an Asia/Pacific Customers’ Choice and also named a Strong Performer in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Cloud DBMS report.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems, 18 December 2024

Gartner, Voice of the Customer for Cloud Database Management Systems, 24 May 2024

Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

GARTNER, MGAGIC QUADRANT and PEER INSIGHTS are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About OceanBase

OceanBase is a distributed database launched in 2010. It provides strong data consistency, high availability, high performance, cost efficiency, elastic scalability, and compatibility with mainstream relational databases. It handles transactional, analytical, and AI workloads through a unified data engine, enabling mission-critical applications and real-time analytics.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.oceanbase.com/

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SOURCE OceanBase

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Matwings Technology Raised Series A Funding of Tens of Millions USD to Redefine Protein Design

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‘Beyond Structure, Predicting Function’

SHANGHAI, Dec. 25, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, Shanghai Matwings Technology Co., Ltd. (‘Matwings’), a global leader in AI-driven protein design, announced the successful completion of Series A funding rounds, raising tens of millions of USD, led by Qiming Venture Partners.

Matwings is pioneering a new frontier in protein engineering with its proprietary AI-based general protein design platform, AccelProtein™, which directly predicts protein functionality beyond the structural data. By predicting functionality, AccelProtein™ offers a new approach for acquiring high-functioning proteins.

AccelProtein™ is built on the Pro-PRIME model, a breakthrough developed by a collaborative team led by Professor Liang Hong at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. After years of research focused on data collection, curation, and optimization, the team developed the Pro-series – an AI framework for protein design. Their work, titled “A General Temperature-Guided Language Model to Design Proteins of Enhanced Stability and Activity” was recently published in Science Advances.

A featured case of AccelProtein™’s impact is the design of a specialized Glycosyltransferase enzyme, which is used in the production of EPS-G7, a core material for pancreatitis screening. Within just 4 months, Matwings increased the enzyme’s total glycosylation activity by 7 times, enhanced product specificity from 60% to 98%, and reduced hydrolytic activity by 33%. These improvements cut down the cost of EPS-G7 by 90%.

In another application, Matwings successfully engineered a super alkali-resistant affinity ligand (a nanobody) for affinity chromatography, improving alkali resistance by 3 folds, binding capacity over 100%, and heat stability by 8℃. This innovation saved millions of USD in CMC costs for a Matwings client. Additionally, scale-up production to 5000L has been successfully completed. Such advancement enables low-cost affinity chromatography purification a viable option for a wide range of biologics, bringing more cost-effective solutions for drug production.

Since 2021, Matwings has successfully delivered over 30 protein-engineering and enzyme-mining projects either proprietary (e.g., Enterokinase, Carboxypeptidase B, KEX2 Protease, Maltogenic Amylase, Subtilisin, Protein A, PETase, T7 RNA Polymerase, and phi29 DNA Polymerase) and co-developed with our stakeholders. These projects span across various applications, including drug innovation, in vitro diagnostics, nutrition and healthcare, food and beverage, and green energy.

About Matwings

Matwings, founded in 2021 by an elite team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is one of the earliest companies to focus on AI protein models.

Matwings is dedicated to moving beyond directed evolution methods to design and engineer functionally optimized proteins by leveraging a proprietary, pre-trained, AI-based general protein design platform with 780 million curated full-length protein sequence data, including nearly 500 million private data.

This cutting-edge technology platform, AccelProtein™, enables us to engineer proteins and uncover or de novo design novel proteins with significantly improved properties, including stability, activity, affinity, yield, etc.

To date, Matwings has successfully engineered more than 30 proteins either proprietary or co-developed with its stakeholders, and more than 40 ongoing projects across various applications in pharmaceutical industries and synthetic biology industries, e.g.  key enzymes and proteins for CMC, innovative Biologics, synthetic biology and more.

Matwings is actively seeking global partnerships to jointly develop and commercialize new products.

Contact Information:
Email: info@matwings.com
Website: https://www.matwings.com/en/ 
Tel: +86 158 2106 5410
Paper Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adr2641 

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SOURCE Matwings Technology

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Agoda Highlights Tokyo as Top Global New Year’s Eve Destination

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SINGAPORE, Dec. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Digital travel platform Agoda has announced Tokyo as the most popular destination for New Year’s Eve, based on accommodation searches. This marks a shift from last year when Taipei held the top spot. Following Tokyo, the list includes Bangkok, Taipei, Pattaya, and Osaka, showcasing a diverse range of preferences among travelers.

The data highlights a perpetual interest in Tokyo, a city known for its unique blend of tradition and modernity. Travelers are drawn to its vibrant celebrations, cultural experiences, and iconic landmarks. Bangkok and Taipei, too, continue to be favored destinations, offering rich cultural festivities and lively atmospheres. Pattaya and Osaka also make the list, appealing to those seeking beachside celebrations and culinary delights, respectively.

Agoda’s data reveals Tokyo’s prominence not only on a worldwide scale but also within Japan. Domestic accommodation searches have increased by 23%, with Tokyo leading as the preferred destination, followed by Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, and Okinawa Main Island. For Japanese traveling abroad, the destinations primarily considered are Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok, Pattaya, and Hong Kong.

Hiroto Ooka, Associate Vice President North Asia at Agoda said: “Tokyo’s rise to the top of Agoda’s New Year’s Eve destination list is a testament to the city’s global appeal. Whether you’re celebrating New Year’s Eve in Tokyo, Osaka, or anywhere else in the world, Agoda is ready to help you find the perfect spot to ring in the New Year.”

As travelers prepare for their New Year’s Eve plans, Agoda offers a comprehensive selection of over 4.5 million holiday properties, more than 130,000 flight routes, and over 300,000 activities, all available for seamless booking. Download the Agoda app for the latest deals or visit agoda.com/deals.

 

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SOURCE Agoda

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