Samsung to solidify lead in hyper-connected with 5G, AI, IoT

Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung Electronics, speaks during the 2019 Samsung AI Forum at the company's R&D center in Seoul, Tuesday. / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

By Baek Byung-yeul

Samsung Electronics is seeking to take the lead in the “hyper-connected world” where everything is connected via internet and mobile apps, by enhancing its fifth-generation (5G) networks, artificial intelligence (AI) capability and internet of things (IoT) technologies, the head of the company's smartphone unit said Tuesday.

“In the era of a hyper-connected world, where everything is connected through 5G, AI and IoT technologies, a company that can provide a distinctive user experience will become the global business winner,” Koh Dong-jin said during the second day of the 2019 Samsung AI Forum at the firm's R&D campus in Seoul.

Stating that “5G and AI technologies are backbones for smartphones, wearable, speakers, IoT, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), and provide a turning point for our everyday lives,” the president said, “Samsung will take the lead in 5G and AI technologies.”

The chief of Samsung's IT and mobile business said the tech giant is also strengthening its research and development in artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology, the next step in machine learning which enables devices to perform intellectual tasks just like humans do.

Koh said the company will manufacture more foldable smartphones in 2020 in order to solidify its leadership in the new screen technology. However, he remained cautious about the release date of a clamshell-style foldable phone demonstrated in the U.S. in October, saying, “the company will give more details in due time.”

Samsung has picked AI technology as one of its new growth engines and operates seven research centers in five countries. To form networks and share knowledge in the emerging technology, the company invited AI gurus from all over the world for its two-day forum in held Monday and Tuesday.

The second day event featured Noah Smith, a professor at the University of Washington, and Abhinav Gupta, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University, as keynote speakers.

Under the theme, “Rational recurrences for empirical natural language processing,” Smith introduced recurrent neural networks (RNN), a type of AI that is used for text recognition, and Gupta talked about improving computer vision technology.

Vaishak Belle, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, shared his thoughts on a systematic way to integrate human knowledge and data-driven learning methods; while New York University professor Joan Bruna introduced the progress in graph neural networking (GNN), a type of machine learning technology that's capable of interpreting graph data.