Use AI to solve practical problems. This is the original intention of Min Wanli, chief scientist of Alibaba Cloud artificial intelligence.
Text/Ma Lan
When I saw Min Wanli’s photo for the first time, I thought I had searched for the wrong person. This is exactly like the doctor in "Detective Conan"! It turns out that the hairstyles may not be the same, but the doctors are all real doctors!
Comparison chart between Dr. Min Wanli
His alumni have a common name:
graduates of the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China
Min Wanli, Zhang Yaqin, Chen Xiaowei , Ma Dongmin, Zhuang Xiaowei, Jiang Hongyu, Niu Tianhua, Cai Tianxi, Yin Xi, Zhu Changhong , Cao Huining... These seemingly unrelated people all have a common name: , a famous figure in the Youth Class of the University of Science and Technology of China!
Yes, Min Wanli is a legendary graduate of the University of Science and Technology of China. Those who enrolled with him include: Zhuang Xiaowei, the youngest Chinese academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yin Xi, a Harvard professor who broke the Chinese age record for promotion, and Discovery Qin Luchang, who created the world's smallest carbon nanotube, and Lu Zhengtian, who invented the atomic trap tracking analysis method...
If you know the details of the Junior Class of the University of Science and Technology of China (referred to as the Junior Class of the University of Science and Technology of China), you will not be surprised. In 1978, 21 precocious teenagers were selected to enter the University of Science and Technology of China. For a time, the junior class became famous all over the world. It turns out that this youth class is a major innovation in the history of education in our country. Encyclopedia notes: It mainly recruits young people who have not completed regular middle school education but have excellent academic performance to receive college education.
USTC Junior Class
In other words, the boys and girls who enter this junior class are already "prodigies" to a certain extent, and here we will further explore the talents of prodigies and cultivate their acquired skills.
Min Wanli's entry into this class is inseparable from his experience as a "teenage prodigy".
has to be talked about since 1991.
At the end of 1991, Min Wanli participated in an Olympic winter camp training. Because of his reputation as a "child prodigy", Min Wanli attracted much attention. At that time, a professor from the University of Science and Technology of China also happened to go to this winter camp, and he immediately fell in love with a child who showed extraordinary talent in mathematical thinking—yes, this child was Min Wanli. After
was chosen, the professor directly gave Min Wanli the qualification to apply for the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China. You know, this is the qualification for key middle schools. Min Wanli did not have this qualification before. Sure enough, in 1992, Min Wanli lived up to expectations and was admitted to the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China.
From then on, Min Wanli became a student in the world-famous youth class, and he formed a lifelong bond with mathematical and physical thinking.
left IBM and Google, and returned to China 16 years later.
After being admitted to the junior class of the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992, Min Wanli's academic performance skyrocketed. He received his master's degree in physics from the University of Chicago in 1997 and his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 2004. In other words, Min Wanli has been studying abroad since leaving the Junior Class of the University of Science and Technology of China.
However, even though he has been in a foreign country for 16 years and has become familiar with the way of expression and even the way of eating in a foreign country, Min Wanli still started to return to his country. "When I learned that the amount of customer data owned by a Chinese company is more than eBay, Amazon, PayPal combined, this sentence is enough for me."
However, and people around me Just as they couldn't understand his decision to return to China, they couldn't understand his career choices along the way.
For example, in 2004, he gave up Wall Street .
Wall Street in the United States has narrow and short streets, with only 7 sections from Broadway to the East River, but it is famous throughout the world as the "Financial Center of the United States". This is because the management offices of banks, insurance, shipping, railways and other companies established by the American Morgan chaebol, Rockefeller oil king and DuPont consortium are concentrated here. Therefore, if you receive an olive branch from Wall Street, you are basically climbing the first step to power and money.
However, Min Wanli refused. Perhaps because of the Chinese elements flowing in his bones, he sometimes wants to leave those busy atmospheres.You know, although Min Wanli is a science and engineering man obsessed with mining the value of data, he is also very interested in writing poems, lyrics, and composing music. This gives him an elegant temperament and makes him decide to give up Wall Street. Decide. As he said, he goes every week: "If you are always busy running around in the city, and your field of vision is blocked by steel and concrete, and you can only have a glimmer of hope by looking to the sky, then wouldn't you become a frog in the well?"
He No. The second surprise was that he gave up his career as a researcher at IBM Watson Research Institute and Google and returned to China after 16 years away from the country.
In 2013, Min Wanli joined Alibaba . Now serves as the chief scientist of Alibaba Cloud Artificial Intelligence.
Min Wanli serves as the chief scientist of Alibaba Cloud Artificial Intelligence
Although he receives at least two emails from headhunters every day, although there are several phone calls, text messages, and emails from headhunters a day, although the salary offered is sometimes higher than that of Alibaba. But this did not shake Min Wanli's determination to stay in Alibaba. Because here is the best resource for artificial intelligence - Alibaba has more customer data than eBay, Amazon, and PayPal combined.
In fact, for a talent like Min Wanli, who has been engaged in machine learning theory research and application algorithm development for a long time, and has obtained multiple national patents in the fields of brain wave analysis, high-dimensional data mining, random process theory, time series analysis, etc., he is a domestic talent. All major artificial intelligence companies need it.
What attracted Min Wanli to Alibaba? Jack Ma !
So, what did Alibaba do to attract Min Wanli? The answer is: Jack Ma! May 3, 2013, is a special day for Min Wanli. Because on this day, Jack Ma gave a speech at Stanford Business School. At the symposium in the evening, Min Wanli heard Jack Ma talk about his vision and analysis of the Internet. At that time, he strongly agreed with his beliefs and firmly believed that he would succeed.
So, when I wanted to return to China, I chose Alibaba.
In fact, many people know the predecessor of ET, which was Xiao Ai. It attracted attention in 2012. This Xiao Ai was actually a project led by Min Wanli. He believes that the current ET is actually still in the 1.0 stage. Although it already has the perceptual capabilities of listening, speaking, and seeing, and has already output decisions in some fields, ET also needs continuous iteration on the artificial intelligence platform.
Therefore, at the previous Alibaba conference, Jack Ma proposed the NASA plan, and in this plan, Alibaba Cloud ET is undoubtedly the vanguard of the group.
Jack Ma believes that big data is important
And Min Wanli, Alibaba’s chief scientist of artificial intelligence, will be the vanguard of this vanguard.
In Min Wanli's view, Alibaba Cloud ET, in addition to serving Alibaba Group's own e-commerce business, must also undertake more external practical applications. And all of this stems from the big data that Jack Ma is currently talking about.
Jack Ma has a saying: Past development was based on oil and coal, and future technological development is based on new energy, which is big data. Computing power and algorithms are tools through which new energy can be transformed into various products and wisdom can be extracted from massive data.
Alibaba's artificial intelligence and Alibaba Cloud ET are also built on this foundation. ET is characterized by its powerful cloud computing and big data processing capabilities. Currently, ET has skills in speech recognition, image/video recognition, traffic prediction, sentiment analysis, etc., and is developing in the direction of big data AI.
Therefore, in Min Wanli's view, ET will become intelligent in terms of global insight and real-time measurement. It can surpass humans in some aspects, complement human abilities, and play more roles in the business society.
After helping "Kuaidi" to help "Are you hungry?", Alibaba Cloud ET once took action invisibly
In fact, Alibaba Cloud ET is not like the legendary "dragon tail but not the head". No, the "hungry" commonly used by office workers "I have benefited from this.
When Are You Hungry and waiting for food delivery to become popular, two difficulties arise: buyers often wait hungry, while riders walk a few extra kilometers and take detours.
Min Wanli once used a picture to vividly explain how difficult it is.
If the number of points rises to ten thousand...
He drew ten points on this paper, which represent the ten takeaway buyers, or the ten places the rider will go. Now the solution is: use the shortest line to connect N points, and each of these points is changing, disappearing or appearing suddenly. The ten points of
look very easy, and manual coordination can completely handle it. However, when these points increase by tens of thousands or even tens of millions, the problem becomes even more uncontrollable, especially when it is affected by weather and regional road conditions. This difficulty may only lead to the failure of Hungry's business.
So, are you hungry and found Alibaba Cloud. Min Wanli took the lead in overcoming this problem. Through ET's multi-dimensional algorithm, it accurately estimates the restaurant's meal delivery time, the rider's riding speed, and the waiting time to pick up the meal, giving the rider the optimal judgment and choice. With this move,
Min Wanli’s team directly solved the problem that had plagued Hungry.me for 8 years. Many media said, "He used AI to help 100 million people eat hot meals."
Before that, when Didi and Kuaishou were fighting, Alibaba Cloud ET had already made a breakthrough.
In 2014, Alibaba Cloud's ET team developed an intelligent algorithm scheduling system for Kuaidi Taxi-hailing and "Person-Vehicle Allocation". It was launched at the end of 2014, which greatly improved the driver's success rate in order grabbing and compressed order dispatching. Waiting time.
For more exciting information, follow the WeChat public account: caia617 and join the China Artificial Intelligence Robot Alliance WeChat communication group immediately.
