The Acer Group is set to have a strong presence at the 2024 Smart City Summit & Expo (SCSE), with 9 subsidiaries participating, showcasing various solutions under smart technology and urban sustainability.
Acer Chairman and CEO Jason Chen said that Acer's subsidiaries develop different sectors. They are then connected with the group's strength to compete with a platform approach.
The subsidiaries of Acer Group participating in SCSE 2024 are AcerITS, AcerGadget (AGT), Mobile Power System (MPS), AOpen, Acer Synergy Tech (AST), Altos Computing, SmartFrequency, AcerMedical, and Acer Being Communication (ABC). Their businesses cover diverse sectors such as smart transportation, low-carbon charging, smart mobility, AI surveillance, smart energy storage, smart healthcare, smart buildings, and smart water management.
Headlining the smart transportation sector is AcerITS, which boasts the largest market share of smart roadside parking systems in Taiwan. AcerITS president Kenny Yu stated that their roadside parking system uses license plate recognition and is paired with diverse payment options after parking, making it the best in the world. With another three years of training, their system is now learning to recognize license plates from other countries, preparing for an overseas expansion.
As for smart mobility, AGT showcased a series of new electric-assist bicycles and electric skateboards, powered by MPS's green energy batteries and power systems. In particular, the Acer ebii, which has won several international design awards, has AI technology at its core and integrates the ebiiGO App to provide the best riding experience.
For the low-carbon charging and smart energy storage sectors, AcerITS offers charging station equipment. In the energy storage sector, SmartFrequency has expanded to a microgrid that integrates green energy, energy storage, and energy-saving solutions, developing products that cover industrial energy storage to household/mobile storage systems.
Chia-Chang Lin, chairman of SmartFrequency, emphasized that energy storage and energy-saving are rigid demands, especially in light of Taiwan's recent discussions around electricity price increases. He stated that SmartFrequency's energy-saving solutions can reduce current and voltage without affecting machinery performance. As a result, it protects the machine and reduces electricity costs by 10-20%.
In AI surveillance, Altos Computing and its partners developed the Altos SmartCCTV Solution, featuring smart video surveillance with an AI recognition analysis management platform. Altos also exhibited the "Altos aiWorks Artificial Intelligence Computing Platform," already adopted by many domestic and international universities for AI education, research, and development.
Besides showcasing several Edge IPCs, AOpen pioneered integrated AI detection technology in a public setting, exhibiting dangerous footwear detection for escalators and facial recognition applications. AST, with safety as its priority, integrates all kinds of big data to provide cities with comprehensive and highly efficient security monitoring and management solutions.
AcerMedical presented AI-assisted screening software for diabetic retinopathy (VeriSee DR) and age-related macular degeneration (VeriSee AMD), as well as software for screening bone density abnormalities through chest X-rays (VeriOsteo OP-01), which was recently approved by the TFDA.
With climate change impacting every city due to global warming, existing sponge city designs cannot cope with the heavy rainfall. The record shows that when heavy rain hits, it only takes 30 minutes for a 2-meter-deep sewer to be filled, meaning the response time for flood prevention is short.
ABC continues to follow climate issues, introducing a smart flood prevention and rainwater storage system for buildings. This system allows cities to store more rainwater during heavy rainfall. In collaboration with water resources and meteorology experts, it utilizes AI to convert rainfall data into surface runoff volume, thus transforming rainfall forecast systems into flood prediction systems, providing governments with more time to prepare.
