Alibaba rides to deep space with Alimama and YunOS in tow

Alibaba’s Computing Conference 2016, held last week in Hangzhou, was a stepping stone for its ambitious plans of setting its foot in outer space. Here are some snapshots taken by e27 from the event venue

Alibaba Founder Jack Ma has an ambitious plan to serve two billion customers worldwide, but how will he achieve this hard-to-realise dream?

Of course, Ma must try something that Alibaba’s incumbents have not attempted yet: Off-planet.

The company’s cloud computing arm, Alibaba Cloud, is set to provide data storage and analytics services to a super-sized Chinese radio telescope, which was recently unveiled in Guizhou Province, to search for signals from intelligent life in other galaxies, among other more pedestrian scientific pursuits, such as learning more about the formation of the universe.

With a dish the size of 30 soccer fields, the 500-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is a deep-space research facility capable of gathering enormous amounts of data: 50 terabytes in a single day — an amount roughly equal to the data contained in 25,000 high-resolution digital movies.

 

The challenge is sifting all those bits and bytes to find meaningful information. In a collaboration with the National Astronomical Observatory of China, Alibaba Cloud will help develop a cloud-based Big Data platform to support its research.

There are also plans to establish a Big Data astronomical data and research centre that would source information from other Chinese projects, including the Guo Shoujing Telescope, which is being used by the Chinese Academy of Science to conduct a five-year spectroscopic survey of 10 million stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and millions of other galaxies.

Alibaba Cloud officials say the company is suited for these tasks because of its accomplishments in advanced large-scale computing and artificial intelligence (AI), which promises to speed up the analysis of vast amounts of astronomical data. Alibaba Cloud’s Apsara OS is a platform that organises the processing power of millions of servers into a huge computational engine. The company is also harnessing AI technologies such as deep learning.

The proposed research centre is expected to include an open online database of information about the cosmos that will be available to researchers all over the world.

Alibaba Cloud announced ‘City Brain’, a smart city project that it is conducting with Hangzhou’s city government and a dozen other companies. The City Brain project aims to use AI to create a computerised, automated public services infrastructure that can intelligently adapt to changing conditions to optimise services in real time.

The project is already helping to ease traffic congestion in Hangzhou — where Alibaba Group has its headquarters — by applying Alibaba Cloud’s ET artificial intelligence software and Big Data analytics.

Employing video and image recognition technologies to analyse traffic conditions, the programme is able to predict trouble spots, adjust the timing of traffic lights, and determine optimal travel routes in real time. During initial testing in Hangzhou’s Xiaoshan District that began last month, the system boosted traffic flow by up by 11 per cent, according to Alibaba Cloud.

Wang Jian, chairman of Alibaba’s Technology Steering Committee, said the project is an unprecedented experiment, one made possible by ongoing rapid advances in computer science. “Computing capacity is not a barrier for innovation anymore,” he said during the cloud-computing conference.

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