Tech & Sci
11:53, 11-Oct-2017
Solving problems of the future: Alibaba announces its first research institute
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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group has announced the launch of an innovative global research program, the “Alibaba DAMO Academy”, which is designed to increase technological collaboration worldwide.
Alibaba's founder and chairman, Jack Ma, made the announcement during The Computing Conference 2017 on October 11 at Hangzhou's Cloud Town in east China's Zhejiang Province.
Ma said Alibaba will make a 100-billion-yuan (15 billion US dollars) investment on DAMO for initial funding, but requires the research institute to be profitable afterwards.
The academy will oversee the opening of research and development labs around the globe and seek to recruit talented scientists and researchers to join the program. Research areas include data intelligence, quantum computing, and human-machine interaction.
"Alibaba hopes to make its own business model. We need to make our own path," Ma said, adding that to do so Alibaba will stand on the shoulders of other giants such as IBM, Microsoft, and Bell Labs.
The academy also revealed members of its "all-star" academic advisory committee. Most of them have a research background in information technology.
The 10-member committee includes Michael Jordan, a top researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, and George Church, a leader in the human genome project.
The committee also has some prestigious Chinese members, including professor Li Kai from Princeton University who is noted for his pioneering contributions to distributed shared memory; and Huang Ru, scholar in nanotechnology – and the youngest woman in the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The committee will provide suggestions on the academy's research directions, key development areas, and its important tasks. DAMO plans to recruit about 100 top scientists and researchers in its initial stage.
Differing from many other institutes who research for profit or fun, DAMO, in Ma's words, will research for solving problems "with profit and fun."
For the future, Ma mentioned three “musts” for the institute.
First, DAMO must live longer than Alibaba. Second, DAMO must be able to service two billion consumers, provide jobs to 100 million people, and create 10 million profitable enterprises. Last but not least, DAMO must solve the problems of the future.
Eighteen years since Alibaba was founded, the father of the company said he believes in China’s potential in terms of talent, technologies and resources, which gives the country the power to make its own path.
The Computing Conference held by Alibaba, an annual convention focusing on cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence (AI), will run until October 14.
CGTN's Wang Qiwei also contributed to the story.
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