Over the decades, the Gulf city of Dubai has emerged as a land of innovation and a place where future could be felt right now in the present. The city is actively encouraging global collaborations to drive innovation and future technology in the United Arab Emirates and internationally through its Dubai Future Accelerators (DFA) initiative that was launched in 2016 under the aegis of Dubai Future Foundation.

In recent years, many Chinese tech firms and start-ups – which are known for their technological prowess – have partnered with DFA to contribute in their mission of imagining, designing and co-creating solutions for future challenges.

One such successful initiative has come from Beijing-headquartered Alesca Life, an agro-tech company that is creating next-generation urban farming solutions that consume five percent water and 30 percent energy vis-à-vis conventional farming.

To get an overview of DFA's future innovation agenda and how Chinese firms are contributing in making that vision a reality, CGTN Digital's International Editor Abhishek G. Bhaya spoke with Faisal Al Hawi, the head of Accelerator and Incubators at the Dubai Future Foundation, and Stuart Oda, the founder and CEO of Alesca Life.

Al Hawi is responsible for creating a myriad of programs that connect different stakeholders, government and private, with innovative startups and companies from around the world to experiment with and making Dubai the test bed for future ideas.

Oda is an investment banker-turned- urban farmer with a passion for innovation and sustainability. He founded Alesca Life in 2013 with an aim to make food production more localized and data driven.

Edited excerpts:

Bhaya: Faisal, please tell us a bit about the vision of the DFA initiative and what it aims to achieve and also some of the main areas and technologies it has tasted success in the past four years?

Al Hawi: Dubai Future Accelerators is an initiative that was born four years ago under the Dubai Future Foundation. The vision was pretty much straightforward – to put Dubai as a leading city of the world when it comes to technology innovation. Our mission is to turn Dubai into a global testbed for innovations and technologies. The DFA looks around for all the start-ups in the global scene, trying to understand the technology needs, the partner needs, the local ecosystem needs, and trying to bridge the gap between these two players of the market.

We do this in what we call the Area 2071, which is like the heart of our ecosystem in Dubai and we've had tremendous success. Throughout the four years, we've run eight cohorts, the eighth cohort is ongoing as we speak. We've engaged with more than 300 start-ups and over 60 pilot projects were produced out of DFA and more than 150 memoranda of understanding or commercial agreements were signed with different government entities and private sector partners.

Dubai Future Accelerators is positioned in a way that basically bridges the gap between the big players, be it government or private sector, and the start-up innovators from around the world.

Bhaya: How many Chinese firms and start-ups have availed the DFA program so far? Please name some of the major projects the Chinese entities have undertaken in the UAE as part of the DFA initiative.

Al Hawi: We've worked with Chinese companies ever since Cohort 1 back in 2016. So, Alesca Life is one of them. Shellpay, which was a fintech company working with the General Directorate of Immigration in Dubai, was another company. There was another company called Future Trends, working with Dubai Health Authority on medical imaging, and utilizing the technologies of AI and machine learning to optimize diagnosis of late-stage cancers.

Yitu Technology is another Chinese AI-based company which worked very closely with [UAE's largest telecom service provider] Etisalat on solving some of their telecom related issues. So these are just to name a few companies that worked with us.

We really understand the strength Chinese ecosystem brings to our ecosystem. And I think we complement each other in a lot of areas.

Another example, broader than just Dubai Future Accelerators, is within Area 2071, where SenseTime actually has an office here, and they work very closely with the AI office, in a couple of strategic projects.

So, the partnership is growing stronger and stronger, year after year. And we definitely believe that there are areas specifically in the fourth industrial revolution technologies, blockchain, AI and IoT and the likes that we will definitely materialize more and more outcomes and success moving forward.

Bhaya: Stuart, what is the story behind Alesca Life?

Oda: Seven years ago, I started Alesca Life here in Beijing. The vision of the company is to democratize access to fresh and nutritious food by democratizing the means and the knowledge of production.

And the more research that I was doing, it became very clear that one of the most pressing challenges over the next decades wasn't so much actually related to connectivity, as these things were becoming easier with the proliferation of smartphones and computers, but access to fresh and nutritious food. And so, my team and I wanted to find a way in which we can make this access a lot easier. And wherever it made sense to localize that fresh food production, and wherever food production currently existed to make it more data driven.

So we set on this journey seven years ago, and we currently have our teams and offices across Japan, China, and the United Arab Emirates and we have partnerships across many more countries. We're developing precision farming tools to accomplish, to increase the productivity, the profitability, and the predictability of food production by up to 10 times.

Bhaya: The urban farming technologies including vertical farms and data-driven food production are certainly relevant for an arid region like the Arabian Peninsula. How did your partnership with DFA come about and what has been the journey like in the UAE for Alesca Life?

Oda: In 2016, our team was selected into the DFA program as part of Cohort 1. It was actually our first entry into the Gulf region. We knew that the technology had huge promise and potential in the region, and we wanted to make a serious commitment to the region. The DFA program was kind enough to offer us a spot in Cohort 1.

It has been hugely transformational in two ways. You know, the way in which business is done in the Middle East is very different. And to be able to have an organization like DFA, both providing the meaningful introductions, reducing some of the barriers related to the company's formation, and then also just the credibility that is bestowed on some of the companies that get to go through the program. All three of these things contributed enormously to our success in the region.

Through this program we've also been able to find meaningful strategic partnerships to mitigate some of the challenges related to concentration of supply chain, for example, even being in a place like China, to have manufacturing bases and other places in other countries, is beneficial for us.

So, right after the DFA program, we had an opportunity to localize the manufacturing of our container farm in the Emirates of Ajman in the UAE, so that we can serve our customers and our base in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) and also to showcase our commitment to the region that we're not just there to sell our systems, but that we are there for the long term.

Bhaya: The year 2020 has been a watershed in many ways for the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforcing our increasing reliance on digital and AI technologies without which we can't imagine a future. How did the global crisis impact the long-term vision of DFA?

Al Hawi: The pandemic has definitely affected everyone. At DFA, we realized that innovation is the way to be resilient for the future, prepared for the future and understanding exactly the problems of today that potentially, and unfortunately, led us into the pandemic. We had just a very short drop in time in which everybody had to just realign ourselves, and that was around March. But we immediately resumed back in October.

Not just the DFA, I think all the government entities as well as start-ups realized how important a role they play in this ecosystem. And Cohort 8, that is currently ongoing and will last until the end of March, is specifically looking at challenges that will basically be more specific around life after COVID.

I'll share a couple of examples. The Dubai Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) is looking into new solutions of shared mobility. We are very much accustomed with the ride hailing apps and public transport systems. But that has changed forever. So they (RTA) are really being proactive in trying to foresight what new models of public transport and shared mobility will be out there. And we're really excited to see what comes out as solutions in a couple of weeks' time.

Another entity which is really looking at how things might evolve in the health care sector is the Dubai Health Authority. They are focusing on preventive health care measures, solutions and products, but not only from a sense of being preventive or proactive but in a sense of also democratizing access to that device.

Bhaya: Food security is already a global concern and going to be a top challenge in the future. It did aggravate last year due to the supply-chain disruption caused by the pandemic. What are some of the innovative solutions that Alesca Life offers to meet this challenge and has COVID-19 triggered a sense of greater urgency?

Oda: This is a great point. Pre-pandemic, in 2018-19, a lot of the interest and investment from governments, companies and investors was in food tech, which was related to food delivery and meal kits at home. And it was really focused on one thing, which was consumer convenience. What has happened in 2020, with the pandemic and now that we're in 2021, is that the focus has shifted materially from food tech to agtech - agricultural technology, which is focused on resilience. It's about community resilience, as opposed to consumer convenience.

So, one of the solutions, the benefits or the outcomes of the pandemic, was a renewed interest in agtech. And by that, I mean, local food production being in control of your own supply chain for fresh and nutritious food. So, since the pandemic has happened, since the lockdowns have begun, I've probably spoken to individuals and government entities from over 30 countries that are interested in finding ways in which they can secure a minimum supply of local fresh food production in their own countries, in their own communities.

The shift has accelerated towards this localization, towards this decentralized form of food production that can happen almost anywhere. And one of the solutions that we're providing for this is to bundle all of our precision farming tools – our monitoring equipment, our automation systems, our farm management and software tools, and even our latest computer vision AI cameras – and bundle all these products together to create an incredibly capital efficient indoor farm. And this allows both governments, at large scale, and even community, at a smaller scale, to be able to be in control of their local food production needs.

Interviewer and script: Abhishek G Bhaya

Video editors: Meiyi Yan & Wu Chutian

Cover image: Du Chenxin

Infographics: Jia Jieqiong

Director: Mei Yan

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