Profile: ocean blue, alibaba group P9 level employees, artificial intelligence, a senior expert, 8 years work experience, participated in the establishment of the pay treasure to business process, and lead the team for the design of intelligent customer service platform, currently responsible for intelligent robot platform construction of wanda group, ali in NLP, machine learning and deep learning experience.
In alibaba xixi park visitor centre, we met was born in 1986 in the blue sea, gaunt face hung carefully trimmed beard, long hair is combed meticulously to the hindbrain, which makes him look more like a reclusive hangzhou artist, it is hard to get to his head with artificial intelligence research and development team together.
At the beginning of this year, Haiqing was promoted to P9 employee by the group. It also makes him one of alibaba’s youngest P9s in the field of ARTIFICIAL intelligence, and in a few months, he will have served alibaba for more than nine years. From a college student who just walked out of the ivory tower, to a researcher who successfully transformed the algorithm through hard self-study, to a technical leader who led the team to devote himself to the Alipay project, and now to a P9 engineer who is independently responsible for the whole business line of Ali Xiaomi, haiqing has grown at an amazing speed in Ali in the past 9 years.
“Opportunity is equal for everyone.” Talking about her achievements in Alibaba over the years, Haiqing felt that the halo of being a technical expert should ultimately be carried out to lead a team, find direction and solve problems. ‘That happens to be his strong suit,’ Mr. Haiqing said.
When I first entered the workplace, I tried to learn transformation algorithms by myself
Haiqing, a junior at a university in Hangzhou, faced a test in 2008 when, a few months earlier, he joined Alibaba as an intern at the group’s Alisoftware unit through a campus job fair. Even then, it was not easy to get into Ali. Haiqing, a software engineering major, stood out from more than 200 applicants, which once made him confident in his programming skills.
But when she started her internship, She realized she had underestimated the difficulty of the job. Carrying a backpack, haiqing went in and out of the company every day and worked with those young talents in the IT industry. For the first time, haiqing felt the gap between the campus and the workplace — her programming knowledge was either too superficial or too outdated to be useful.
Haiqing felt embarrassed and even worried about the future: “I clearly felt my lack of knowledge at that time. There was a huge gap between the knowledge of the university and the industry.”
In order to make up for her shortcomings, Haiqing began to work overtime to improve her programming skills, arriving at the office early every weekday and leaving late at night. In addition to following the project team to participate in the development and maintenance of the system, Haiqing spent the rest of her energy reading the group’s code documents and framework.
“In the first two years, I would go to the company every Saturday to read the source code of interesting technologies. Only by consciously organizing the framework system and cultivating my framework ability in this field did the structure system in this area gradually improve.”
Much of Haiqing’s early growth was achieved by voluntarily sacrificing countless weekends to read source code and frameworks at the company — thanks to the fact that Ali always made the source code for all its projects available to its internal programmers.
For programmers, reading source code is the best way to learn from other people’s development experience. Haiqing absorbs the high-quality code documents inside Ali tirelessly, and the feeling of difficulty at the beginning of work is gradually relieved, replaced by the improvement of efficiency.
Originally, the internship in Ali was just a practice in the young man’s planning. After the enterprise experience, he planned to continue his study in university as a graduate student. But a few months as an intern at Ali changed him.
“I decided not to pursue a master’s degree at that time. After a few months of internship at Alibaba, I thought I could learn more from working in the company than from studying for a master’s degree.”
After graduating from college, Haiqing chose to stay in Ali without hesitation. In July 2009, Haiqing became an official employee of Alibaba at the rank of P4.
In Ali, there are young people full of energy everywhere. Influenced by the environment, Haiqing dare not slack off. In his first two years, he rarely left the office before sunset, and weekends at the office were a regular occurrence. Haiqing felt that the rhythm was natural. The bulls were so diligent. Why not?
In April 2010, haiqing’s technical team, which had been working on platform systems, was tasked with a new task — chatbot.
The chatbot project was different from any other team task Haiqing had worked on before. Almost all the developers had no background in algorithms, and learning algorithms became the focus of haiqing’s colleagues’ work. Although Haiqing’s job responsibilities do not involve algorithms, he is sensitive to the fact that the power of algorithms is gradually spreading across all business areas and will soon be a coveted skill.
“Transformation is a painful and lengthy process. As you can see from my experience, I had no background related to algorithms before. How to grow from a complete blank in the algorithm field to a person who can play a role in algorithm projects and solve problems was what I thought most at that time.” Haiqing, who had just been promoted to P5, was determined to find out the algorithm.
Hai Qing seems to have gone back to his student days of cramming for exams. He bought a thick volume of Statistical Natural Language Processing and spent his spare time every day reading up on algorithms. At the same time, Alibaba’s perfect document sharing channels and community also helped Haiqing a lot.
In these communities, Haiqing trawled through all the documents about algorithms, and when he couldn’t understand the content, he would communicate with the authors of these documents online. After communicating with each other more often, Haiqing would try to meet each other offline. Through these means, Haiqing got to know a group of technical talents inside Ali, who contributed their algorithm experience to this young man who was addicted to technology.
At first, the green sea’s main job is in the module development and architecture field, he is good at later due to the working content and research relative to disconnect algorithm, he began to consider how to let oneself builds the architecture of the system and algorithm to connect properly, with his knowledge of algorithm involved in more and more deep, green sea also began to try to do some optimization work.
As time goes by, Haiqing’s initial feeling of being unfamiliar with the algorithm is imperceptibly resolved in the day-to-day study and polishing. In the end, with the joint efforts of Haiqing and his team, the chatbot was successfully developed. Around the same time, Haiqing was upgraded to P6.
In succession, from 1688 to ICBU to Aliexpress, Haiqing participated in the work of building intelligent customer service for all class B businesses under Ali. The new business attracted him more than his previous work in architecture and research and development, and Haiqing vaguely sensed that artificial intelligence might be a promising new field.
He was glad that he had followed his inner judgment and not stayed comfortable with his old technique. “If I had backed down, there would have been a way out, but there would have been no future.”
Grasp the nettle and build an intelligent customer service system for Alipay
There is always a bottleneck in everyone’s work experience, and haiqing is no different. The future of artificial intelligence did not come too fast, but Haiqing’s career bottleneck came first.
First of all, the intelligent customer service business has been stable. Although the work of Haiqing and his colleagues has brought new technical support to Alibaba B2B, the intelligent customer service has not become the core business, and after the completion of the customer service system, Haiqing only has maintenance work. From 2011, such a state lasted for more than a year.
As time went on, Haiqing felt that he had lost his initial passion. Meanwhile, he was worried that his team’s business scene was always monotonous. If things go on like this, his career development and technical accumulation would be stalled. At that time, Haiqing was thinking mostly about what other potential business scenarios he could play in.
Soon, a new opportunity came to Haiqing.
In 2012, the group’s well-known third-party payment platform “Alipay” was looking for a team capable of building an intelligent customer service system for the group.
At that time, Haiqing had accumulated rich intelligent experience in 2B business, but had never tried to implement intelligent solutions in 2C environment. Alipay, with its huge traffic, is a near-perfect testing ground. More importantly, it will open up new scenarios for the r&d capabilities of intelligent customer service teams. After three months of repeated communication and strong project experience, Haiqing’s team finally won the invitation.
In order to cooperate with the development, haiqing’s intelligent customer service team moved to the Alipay building. Haiqing spent a year and a half in the Alipay building, where he was appointed team leader and created the first consumer-oriented smart customer service product, “Smart Little Treasure.”
When asked why he was chosen as the technical leader, Haiqing answered that it was due to his early RESEARCH and development background and successful algorithm transformation experience. In the team, there are not many employees with both skills, and his insights on product business have always been recognized by the team. The new responsibilities freed Haiqing from the simple technical research and development work, and how to lead the team became a new challenge for the 26-year-old. In addition to the research and development structure, Haiqing began to consider the career planning and technical growth of each team member from the perspective of the overall team personnel allocation.
In 2012, “Double 11” was regarded as a performance acceptance. On that night, Haiqing felt a little nervous, but she was confident about her project and her team members. Reality did not disappoint Haiqing’s efforts. His team and products withstood the test of extreme environment and successfully completed the task on this night.
At this point, Alibaba’s senior management began to take notice of the HEAD of AI technology — although he was a novice, Haiqing had taken on the task of supporting the intelligent customer service needs of almost all b-business, from Alipay to alibaba.
In 2013, Hai Qing led the team to join the newly established Technology Department of Taobao. In this year, his rank was promoted to P7, which means that he has achieved some system achievements in his field and become one of the core leaders in the AI field of the group.
Go to the forefront and become one of the youngest P9s in AI
Also in 2013, deep learning and knowledge mapping were declared the world changing technologies of the year. At this point, Haiqing, already an artificial intelligence expert, was not satisfied with providing technical support for the business. He began to shift his attention to cutting-edge technology.
As an undergraduate, Haiqing is still often aware of his academic shortcomings in cutting-edge technology fields where PHD titles abound. His solution is to learn by himself and invite technical masters to teach him. Haiqing has been used to dealing with challenges from all aspects of technology since he was an intern.
As a matter of fact, haiqing had already consciously accumulated technology when he took over many previous businesses. He methodically increased the technical input of the team in these scenarios, and paid close attention to the research direction of leaders in the AI field such as Google and Facebook. What is lacking is a platform to actually test the technology.
In 2015, the opportunity finally came, Ali decided to launch an intelligent assistant and platform product in the summer of this year, which will collect daily data of Taobao, Tmall and other platforms to provide intelligent services to all consumers of Ali services. The team led by Haiqing is duty-bound to undertake this task, and the new product is named “Ali Xiaomi”.
In the initial stage, the relevant leaders specifically asked Haiqing to talk about his views on the new product. Haiqing put her thoughts on the table, sketched out the product on the spot, and by the end of their two-hour chat, the two had an idea of what their new project would look like.
Before taking charge of Ali Xiaomi, Haiqing had completed the design and development of several chatbots and application scenarios, but none of the products was as complex as Ali Xiaomi. “A lot of people ask me, why don’t you just take the old technology and use it?” When confronted with such problems, Haiqing always patiently explained the technical difficulties of the project to the other party: Ali Xiaomi has included pre-sales service, customer service assistant and other pan-customer service contents that are not involved in traditional customer service, which makes its demand for scenes and language materials unprecedently complicated.
In his view, only cutting-edge technology can support such an ambitious smart product, and in turn, only such products can test these cutting-edge technologies. In the product “Ali Xiaomi”, Haiqing finally added the technologies and ideas accumulated over the years in the field of deep learning and knowledge graph.
In July 2015, Ali Xiaomi was launched to great success. The biggest effect of this product is to enable intelligent services to all merchants using Alibaba’s products, and even enterprises outside Alibaba will benefit. Shortly after the Ali Xiaomi project, Haiqing was promoted to P8 within the group.
Since then, Haiqing has been trying to further expand the realized intelligent customer service technology beyond ali Xiaomiao platform, enabling merchants using Ali products, as well as external enterprises. They started from a demand point and opened up a space with high growth potential for Ali. Haiqing believes this may be the biggest value his team brings to Alibaba.
In June 2017, Haiqing was nominated to accept the defense as a candidate of P9 level employees. In Ali, the jump from P8 to P9 is regarded as one of the most difficult promotions, which means that the candidate has not only hosted major projects within the group, but also accumulated technical experience to have considerable influence in the industry. The employee must pass the relevant defense after accepting the P9 nomination before the promotion is approved.
Haiqing was well aware of the difficulty of the defense. “I was still young, so I took the defense as a rare experience.” The five judges who preside over the defense are all P10, and they happen to be experts in the field of artificial intelligence. Before entering the stadium, Haiqing felt nervous.
However, once the defense began, the tension disappeared, and Haiqing recovered her composure and sensitivity when she was working. In the face of the tricky interrogation from the expert judges, Haiqing meticulously sorted out the technical threads and details, and solved the doubts thrown by the experts one by one. In the end, the judges voted for his experience and business acumen in deep learning. Fortunately, Haiqing passed the defense and was officially promoted to be one of the youngest P9 employees in Ali’s AI field.
100 the offer said
Hai Qing speaks at a methodical pace and answers more than expected. She is the interviewee who makes the questioner feel relaxed. From the conversation with him, we can easily see his excellent qualities: Different from the clumsy words of many people who majored in programming, Haiqing is good at communication and can accurately express his attitude and feelings. Nine years in the same company is unusual in an Internet technology industry where job-hopping is rife. In his previous job changes, he also benefited a lot from his pursuit of professional skills. It was this pursuit and patience that enabled the development intern, who once lamented that he had only learned superficial knowledge, to step by step become the technical backbone of Ali’S AI field.
As for seeming to be on the right track every time, Haiqing replied that he doesn’t really believe in career planning based on position because trends are constantly changing. He just happens to smell technology trends, he said.
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