Ping An Technology wins International AI+ Environmental Protection Competition

SHANGHAI, April 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Ping An Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China, Ltd. ("Ping An" or "the Group"), recently announced another milestone in artificial intelligence (AI). The team at Ping An Brain, a big data platform developed by the subsidiary, won the AI+ Environmental Protection International Competition "Power Laws: Detecting Anomalies in Usage" that has just concluded.     

It is another award garnered by Ping An in a world-class competition in the AI sector, on the heels of the international awards won by Ping An Technology's Ping An Yingxiang platform for the solution of interpreting CT scans using AI and by Ping An Technology's composition technology using AI. The new milestone demonstrates Ping An's increasingly mature technologies in AI while also laying a solid foundation for the group's further research and development in the smart environmental protection and smart city fields.

The competition, co-organized by Schneider Electric, a global leader in energy management, and the leading global data competition community DrivenData, is an important and powerful event in the environmental protection field. The two-month competition themed "Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection" was attended by over 1,700 teams from leading colleges and universities, research institutes and well-known international organizations.

The over 40 million pieces of data in connection with actual power consumption used in the competition was collected from 187 buildings of various types across the world over a seven year period. The biggest challenges facing the competition participants were the detection of unmarked anomalies in power usage from the massive amount of data and the accurate detection of the most relevant anomalies to the actual energy consumption at the anomaly points. An analysis of the anomalies data was required to provide a solution for energy deployment optimization by leveraging the data to build a model, predict the future energy consumption and monitor the anomalies. During the two-month competition, Ping An Technology combined the semi-supervised learning, unsupervised learning and other AI technologies with a professional power energy model to provide a set of anomaly detection algorithms with the aim of saving energy and intelligently protecting the environment. Just one month after the competition started, the company was already maintaining a leading position among the competitors.

During the competition, the data prediction model built by Ping An Technology delivered the highest accuracy and was able to identify anomalies in energy usage and provide a solution for addressing them. The anomalies detected during the competition could help the real-life buildings save 15 to 30% in their consumption of energy.  

As energy consumption continues to increase worldwide, a science-based efficient anomaly detection solution helps improve the utilization of energy as well as reduce waste and emissions significantly. As a result, the detection of anomalies in energy usage is becoming increasingly important to the environmental protection sector. Monitoring the usage of energy with advanced technologies, such as AI, will further inspire the research and application in the smart environmental protection field.

As a major high-tech subsidiary of Ping An, Ping An Technology has rich experience in the application of AI technologies and is capitalizing on its leading technologies to support its involvement in building smart cities. The success in the world-class competition reflects the point to which Ping An has seized the opportunity in taking the lead in applying its AI+ capabilities in the environmental protection sector in line with the Chinese central government's roll out of initiatives focused on the development of the AI sector. The combination of AI and environmental protection supports more accurate pollution prediction, smarter pollution control and more intelligent waste disposal. Ping An's Smart Environmental Protection Cloud solution using AI+ technology will help the responsible government authorities in boosting the development of smart cities.

Ping An plans to continue implementing its Finance + Technology dual strategy and innovating. In addition to strengthening its core businesses with technological achievements, the group, supported by Ping An Technology, aims to boost the real-life application of its core technologies, serve the entire community and ultimately, become a leading global technology-driven personal finance and life services provider. 

SOURCE Ping An Technology