It has been an eventful week for all of us, but Thursday stood out from the rest – We visited Huawei’s R&D Centre! It was primarily a visit for Zhejiang University undergrads to find out more about future career prospects in Huawei, but thanks to our TA, we were also invited to take a look around the place.
We were first brought to view the various technologies and concepts that Huawei has been working on, and one of them is their Live Conference Technology! It aims to simulate a roundtable conference, so its setup consists of half a circle of a real table, with a screen in front of them that displays the other people from another place, with the same setup. Using a number of microphones placed at different positions, the setup can even simulate the direction in which someone is speaking from.
Next, they introduced the AI assisted meeting technology. In this room, they have an AI that can respond to users in a meeting. Users can ask the AI to pull up documents, open up a blank document, etc. The picture below demonstrates our tour guide working on a document. There are tablets on the meeting table that are connected to the document. This allows multiple people to work on it in real time. What is really impressive is that the AI can do translations as people are speaking – from any language to any language! This really allows people to work together even if they do not speak the same language.
They have a cute household AI Robot! Functions include being able to set certain locations in your home for it to remember and go to when you want it to, waking you up in the morning, patrolling your home (and syncing your phone to its camera so you can watch your home from away), and more. It can tell stories, sing and even dance!
Huawei cares for their employees so they even have their own clinic! If employees fall ill, they don’t need to worry about leaving office and finding a doctor or clinic. They can conveniently walk over to their own clinic for consultation!
Our last stop before dinner was Huawei’s training centre. We were exposed to the framework that Huawei uses to train their employees in both technical and managerial skills. It was eye-opening to learn because as students, we have little/no experience working yet. It was really cool to see that they employ VR to teach their employees technical skills!
Following which was dinner and we returned home. It was a long but exciting visit to Huawei and we hope we can visit more companies and learn more!
