Alibaba Cloud has launched its Malaysia City Brain initiative in collaboration with the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), the country’s digital economy development agency, and Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL), the city council in the capital.
The Malaysia City Brain initiative marks the first time that the City Brain solution has been adopted overseas. Developed on Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing infrastructure, the City Brain solution was deployed to support Malaysia’s digital transformation with cloud technology and artificial intelligence.
Powered by Alibaba Cloud’s large-scale computing engine Apsara, Malaysia City Brain offers a comprehensive suite of acquisition, integration, and analysis of big and heterogeneous data generated by a variety of sources in urban spaces through video and image recognition, data mining and machine learning technology. This can aid Malaysian urban planners and city officials in upgrading their city governance and decision-making processes to turn the city into an intelligent one.
In the first phase of the program, the capital Kuala Lumpur will roll out the Malaysia City Brain for use in traffic management to improve mobility in the city. With its cloud computing and data processing capabilities, the City Brain can optimize the flow of vehicles and traffic signals by calculating the time needed to reach intersections. It will also be able to generate structured summaries of data, such as traffic volume and speed in particular lanes, which can be used to facilitate other tasks including incident detection.
In addition, City Brain can connect with various urban management systems including emergency dispatch, ambulance call, traffic command, and traffic light control. By integrating and analyzing real-time data generated from these systems, City Brain can optimize urban traffic flow – for example, identifying the quickest route for emergency vehicles to arrive at the scene within the shortest time frame.
As the City Brain’s functionality expands, enterprises, start-ups, entrepreneurs, universities, and research institutions will also have, in the future, opportunities to access and leverage its artificial intelligence tools to drive a wide range of innovation.
“Cloud computing, data technology and AI have become fundamental tools that all companies and organizations need to operate effectively. Building on this partnership, we are happy to see Malaysia become the first country outside of China to adopt the City Brain,” Alibaba Cloud president Simon Hu said.
“Through the program, we aim to empower all Malaysian stakeholders in both the public and private sectors with the tools to enhance efficiency, advance innovation and succeed in the digital age. For Alibaba Cloud, this is the true meaning of inclusive technology.”
MDEC CEO Yasmin Mahmood added that “the collaboration with Alibaba Group is another leap towards digitizing Malaysia, where knowledge-sharing and the crossover of best practices transpire. As we set our sights on the future, we are excited about the prospects this partnership will bring to our community, and benefiting Malaysians with the tangible results of digital solutions.”
At the same event, Alibaba Cloud also announced the Malaysia Tianchi Big Data Program, a big data crowd intelligence platform that brings together global data experts to collaborate and compete in developing solutions for real world problems. Backed by MDEC, the initiative aims to incubate 500 data professionals and 300 startups in Malaysia within two years by facilitating the use of data intelligence technology through Alibaba Cloud’s cloud computing infrastructure and artificial intelligence capabilities.
The Malaysia Tianchi Big Data Program will be integrated into Alibaba Cloud’s Tianchi global community, which currently comprises more than 120,000 developers and 2,700 academic institutions and businesses from 77 countries. By participating in these big data competitions, Malaysian experts will compete with, and learn from, counterparts across the globe to develop best-in-class data technology.
First published in eGov Innovation