On October 21, Cheng Li, chief technology officer of Alibaba Group, attended the Technology * Sustainable Development Forum of 2021 Cloud Computing Conference and delivered a keynote speech titled “Technological Innovation and Future Life”. He talked about the value of technological innovation and the “good technology” that Alibaba believes and is practicing. This article is shared by Cheng Li.

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On October 21, Alibaba Group chief Technology Officer Cheng Li attended the technology * Sustainable Development Forum of 2021 Computing Conference and delivered a keynote speech titled “Technological Innovation and Future Life”, talking about the value of technological innovation and the “good technology” that Alibaba believes in and is practicing. Here is Cheng Li’s share:

As for alibaba’s technological innovation direction, we used to say internally that “technology creates new business”. How technology brings the innovation of commercial civilization is our innovation direction. With the development of Alibaba’s technology, business and platform to the present scale, we put forward two new words this year: the first is “high-tech”, we will deeply cultivate the high-tech self-reliance; And then there’s “good technology.” What exactly is good technology? There are three words that represent the requirements of “good technology” :

The first word is everyone benefits. Science and technology should start from people, from the needs of people, people-oriented, human service. For all of these problems, we need to go back to our human-centered roots when we are trying to make decisions about right and wrong and direction, which is very important.

The second word is accountability. Technology must be able to take responsibility for the future, and for humanity as a whole, and this responsibility I find particularly important. After the outbreak of the epidemic last year, I have been wondering how we would have faced the epidemic if technology had not developed to this extent, such good digital technology and such strong life technology. I don’t have an answer. Even with the development of technology, we are still very challenged in the face of the epidemic. Therefore, we believe that there will be more challenging problems waiting for us as human beings go forward in the future. Whether our technology is responsible enough to prepare for these problems is very critical.

The third word is open sharing. To solve these problems, no one individual or single enterprise can accomplish them. We must build a truly open and scientific platform, an open platform for productivity and innovation, so that all people can make their contribution to this endeavor. Therefore, we believe that the three key words of good technology are benefit for everyone, responsibility and openness and sharing.

Next, I’ll share with you some of the things alibaba is doing right now.

A “good technology” for everyone

The first one is about people. We always regard customer first as our internal value, but when it comes to customer first, our vision of customers is becoming wider and wider. Not only pay attention to the current service customers, but must pay attention to everyone, among which the vulnerable groups are particularly in need of attention.

For example, how to communicate with the hearing impaired? The language that hearing-impaired people are best at is sign language. Sign language is seen by the eyes, so it is a great challenge for normal people to understand visual language. So the students in Dharma Thought, can we make the machine not only speak sign language, but also understand sign language, so that the machine can become a communication bridge between the hearing impaired people and the deaf people. So we tried to solve the problem of how to make a machine generate sign language, and also make a machine read sign language.

In the process, we found that it was much more difficult than expected, because the richness and individuality of sign language are very difficult to deal with. A small gesture change represents a completely different meaning behind it. It is a problem to be solved by integrating vision, language understanding and so on.

But it’s a problem worth solving, it’s a technical challenge, and once it’s solved the machine can be a very good bridge between the hearing impaired and the hearing impaired. We plan to iterate and mature this technology as soon as possible and make it available to more people with hearing loss. In the future, I hope that not only Alibaba can solve these problems, but we want to open up the technology so that everyone can solve these problems together.

We are beginning to make some progress on this problem. On the screen is alibaba’s virtual digital man, saying to everyone: “Hello, everyone, I’m Mo from Alibaba Dharma House, nice to see you all. I’m good at translating between sign language and natural language. Welcome to Computing 2021.”

The second group is the older group that we are very concerned about. There are two Numbers, one is Chinese aged 60 and above the old man had 264 million dollars, this is very big and people can never be neglected, is another number, in 264 million there were 15.07 million more or less in the elderly in the symptoms of alzheimer’s disease, the proportion of every 100 people, there are about five or six individuals suffering from alzheimer’s disease. How to solve their problems becomes very important.

For senile dementia, early detection and intervention is very important, but screening and early intervention has been a difficult problem. Is there a way for AI to solve or assist in this process? Some teams in Dharma Institute have begun to try to see if the questions that originally relied on manual inquiry and judgment can be better done by machines. This problem is also not simple, it needs to be able to capture various situations of the elderly and make judgments, which requires very comprehensive technical ability.

Dharma school and hangzhou gongshu district health bureau, zhejiang university school of public health, jointly build the first domestic alzheimer’s AI screening products has just been released, the latest test results that we are very confident, machine screening to determine the reliability of the basic can achieve artificial professional level, can shorten the time to a third.

According to the NHC, 80 percent of the public should be aware of the prevention and treatment of alzheimer’s disease by 2022, and 80 percent of the elderly in communities (villages) should be screened for cognitive function by 2022. We hope that advances in technology will help solve the problem of mass early screening for Alzheimer’s disease and make it feasible.

The third is what Alibaba has been doing, how to make digital services not create a digital divide. We are concerned about how more people can have equal access to services such as online shopping, food delivery and taxi hailing. At present, alibaba’s 12 apps have joined the barrier-free action, and each of its important products, Taobao, Autonavi and Ele. me, has released a special version that is more user-friendly and more suitable for their needs, so that everyone can equally enjoy the benefits brought by technology.

Ii. “Good Technology” with Responsibility

In this part, we will discuss how to use technology to solve the problems of the future. Here, I will mention several aspects that we are currently doing:

We have been working on the first thing for about 3 years. The AI Earth team of Dharma Academy has been working on how to use digital technology to solve problems including environment, meteorology, water conservancy and agriculture. Our early entry point is more direct, how to use machines to quickly solve the massive remote sensing images and information. For example, in environmental protection testing and supervision of ecological red lines, it is very inefficient to rely only on human judgment one by one. Machines are very suitable for processing massive data, which is our entry point. In this process, we found that this kind of technology can be used not only for ecological testing, but also for water conservancy, agriculture and so on.

Till now, we found that the machine has a very big opportunity, significant problems with the development of technology can get very good solution, we are very interested in the weather, for example, weather is a very big science, involves a very large mass calculation, need to do to the climate system modeling, to calculus, it’s in the process, The development of AI technology can greatly accelerate the original traditional calculation method, make the complex solution process become more efficient, and greatly improve the accuracy and efficiency of the original forecast.

Therefore, we see that technological development has opened up space, which can not only improve the efficiency and quality of solving problems previously, but also provide new solutions to problems previously almost unsolvable. In this area, we hope that with the development of technology, we can truly digitize the environment and the earth, and use digital technology to provide new solutions to some of the major problems we face. This is the direction we will focus our investment in the future.

Next is green computing. Double carbon is a goal that requires joint efforts of all people. How to solve the carbon problem? For the whole society, carbon emissions are composed of several large subsystems, energy subsystem and production and manufacturing subsystem account for a large proportion of carbon emissions, followed by planting and breeding, transportation, and other industries. How to solve the problem of carbon emissions of large subsystems becomes very critical. In terms of computing, the original understanding is that numbers do not produce carbon, but behind numbers is computing, and computing also needs electricity. How to make computing greener? This is a valuable entry point.

Alibaba previously proposed zero-carbon cloud, which is the infrastructure of the whole future digital foundation. If the cloud can become green and low-carbon, or even zero-carbon in the future, the digital commerce based on cloud can be zero-carbon, which is a very important solution point. How can the cloud be made more low-carbon? Are the calculations of all our commercial systems green enough? In the past we had efficiency targets, how much computing resources we could use to solve the problem of how much volume of business, now we have low-carbon targets more directly, targets for the number of transactions per unit, targets for how much GMV carbon emissions are traded. Our goal this year is to reduce GMV carbon emissions per unit by 15%, and we have launched an internal program specifically to do this.

At the same time, besides electricity consumption, production, manufacturing, industry and agriculture are also important sources of carbon emissions. How digital technology can help these industries reduce emissions is also what we are doing. In general, in order to achieve a dual carbon goal, technology is a key tool, and technology can be used to solve some very valuable problems.

For example, we spend a lot of time dealing with mobile phones. Mobile phones are influencing you, and you are also influencing mobile phones. In the future, whether it can truly become a good partner of human beings is very critical. In the future, how to make our digital partners more reliable, trustworthy and available is the problem we have to solve. Alibaba set up its ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Governance and Sustainability Lab (AAIG) this year specifically to address these issues.

Iii. Open and Shared “Good Technology”

Any problem cannot be solved by a single person or company. It must be open. The opening of science and technology has the following links:

First of all, in basic fields, such as meteorology, environment, biology, etc., it must be an open system. Everyone’s research is part of the big science, and everyone is open to it. Dharma Institute has also established such a direction, including the next generation of AI technology, in these fields, Our scientific research achievements hope to keep open together with the basic research system of big scientific research in the whole society.

The second layer is the openness of all technical software. It to the cloud conference to hear the two words, one is the cloud is the basis of the digital future productivity, the second is the support behind the clouds is open source, open source has become the whole digital world real root, in the process, alibaba how our technology software and technology software all over the world together, constitute a whole society to the root of the digital world, Become a very important part;

The third layer is that we have an open digital productivity platform that makes it easier for everyone to innovate. Going forward, we hope to solve all the problems related to technology in a more open and open way. For example, we hope that all of Alibaba’s barrier-free technologies, including its patents, will be open for all to use and participate in for free.

I would like to make a special mention of open source. Alibaba’s open source has always been a leader in China, and has always been the highest in terms of the number and activity of open source. However, in the early days, our open source was often the spontaneous action of students. When we achieved good technology in our work and it was useful for our work, we opened source it. When thinking about open source today, we began to transform the spontaneous actions of the technical team into more systematic and organized actions. We looked more systematically at what Alibaba should open source. In particular, in the important fields that constitute the root of the future digital world, we made key open source deployment: Including the core operating system, database, data computing, cloud native four areas, all of our cloud native software must be open source, cloud native open source has a very basic concept “trinity”, our own technology, with ali cloud technology provided by the customer, and community of open source technology, we hope that these technologies is a software version, no generation of difference between, On this basis, we make differentiation promotion and improvement for the business, using the “trinity” way hope that the technical software can really form a blood connected whole with open source.

In addition, we hope that talent training and inclusive access to science and technology will help solve the problem of rural revitalization. The talent behind this is particularly critical. With talent, what we teach people to fish is the real “fishing” with three small amounts of water. There are two types of people that ali’s technical team must help.

First is the country, the country revitalization of the ways we do a lot of things, including our designers personally to the countryside last year, do for rural tourism resources, brand promotion, effect is very good, but not our strength alone, the only way is to make the country have their own core talented person, so we put forward rural revitalization of cto plan, that each country has its own technical officer, He can lead the revitalization of rural science and technology, training rural science and technology talents.

Second, with the society as a whole, the digital future there will be a lot of professional is replaced by the digital, but how do we create more new career in the process, let more people get development is very important thing, so we put forward the plan of technology pratt &whitney talent, hope in the next five years, 200000 digital talent cultivation by they can solve the problem of society in the future, To create a better life for people. Every plan is not easy, we still want to work hard to do it.

These are my shares, representing our current thinking and actions. Everything is just beginning. To achieve better technology requires the care and cooperation of all people. I also hope that all friends, we work together to make technology better, let people’s life better.

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