► Contributing author/Li Liang
For Chinese technology companies, this year is a year of storm and dark clouds. Chinese concept stocks collective suffered pre-delisting, Biden signed the " Chip and Science Act ", and high-end EDA was cut off from by . Deliberate suppression of Chinese technology came one after another, but in the face of blockade and living space Despite the squeeze, Chinese companies have not stood still.
Good news came yesterday. The KDD 2022 award, the world's highest academic conference in the field of data science, was announced. The Alibaba Damo Academy team won the "Best Paper Award" in the applied science direction. This is the first time a Chinese company has won this important award. pound awards.
Many people may not know that KDD (ACM SIGKDD) is one of the most difficult computer conferences in the world, and it has led many new technologies in the fields of knowledge discovery, data mining, artificial intelligence . This year, KDD received a total of 2,448 submissions, and only accepted 449. However, 34 papers on , Alibaba, and were selected, accounting for an astonishing proportion. It is one of the companies with the largest number of selected papers in the world. At the same time, Alibaba independently won the only "Best Paper Award" in the direction of applied science, which was a landmark breakthrough. The ones that have won the best awards for over the years are mainly overseas teams such as Google , Amazon , Carnegie Mellon University, etc. Domestic companies have never won the award.
It is worth noting that Alibaba has won awards at the highest conferences in natural language processing, computer vision , data mining and other fields this year, including KDD 2022 Best Paper, ACL 2022 Outstanding Paper, CVPR 2022 Best Student Dissertation and other awards. Earlier, Alibaba also broke history in the field of network communication . Within 4 years, 16 papers were selected for SIGCOMM, the highest conference in the field. In the past nearly 50 years, only more than 10 papers from mainland China were shortlisted. The list of AMiner, an authoritative organization, shows that Alibaba has quietly become one of the top ten computer network research institutions in the world.
The more adverse the external environment is, the more we must be self-reliant and work hard. Alibaba is a microcosm of Chinese private enterprises exploring and tackling core technologies. In recent years, Alibaba's market value and profits have declined, but R&D investment has increased instead of decreasing. According to previous media reports, Alibaba's technology-related costs exceeded 120 billion yuan in the past year, and in the past three years, Alibaba's patents have been invested in Super League 60% is concentrated in hard-core technology fields such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and chips.
In fact, not only Alibaba, but also Tencent , Baidu and other Internet companies have increased investment in research and development and reserved core technologies. Since 2018, under the impact of the treacherous international situation, China's leading companies have had a strong sense of urgency. They must travel long distances, build walls high, accumulate food widely, and be prepared for long-term hard work. At the same time, Race against time to establish technical barriers in key areas.
In the past, we often talked about the innovation of universities and scientific research institutions from 0 to 1, and the innovative status of enterprises was often ignored. But a piece of data has attracted the attention of many people recently. Last year, my country's total social R&D investment reached 2.79 trillion yuan, 76% of which was contributed by enterprises. At the same time, among the top 2,500 companies investing in R&D in the world, 597 Chinese companies are on the list, second only to the United States. Many leading companies have grown up and become the backbone of China's technological innovation.
Recently, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance jointly issued the "Action Plan for Improving Enterprise Technological Innovation Capabilities (2022-2023)". This document is of great significance. clarifies and strengthens the position of enterprises as the main body of technological innovation and supports corporate scientific research. The intensity is unprecedented. proposes for the first time that enterprises should become the main body of scientific and technological innovation decision-making and the main body of gathering scientific and technological talents and innovation resources.
"Action Plan" also puts forward expectations for digital economy and platform economy enterprises, emphasizing that they cannot stop at application scenarios and business model innovation, but must make further breakthroughs in key core technologies of digitalization and intelligence, and continue to lead the way. A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation.
What is gratifying is that some representative companies have taken practical actions. Through continuous efforts and investment, they have achieved solid progress in some fields. has changed from "chasers" to "parallelers" and even "leaders", such as Enter the competition for the “one in a thousand” best research.
In the field of science and technology, we still call for the greatest degree of openness and cooperation, but there is no doubt that we must also be prepared for the worst, and we can still firmly follow our own path even in the most difficult circumstances.
No one can extinguish the starry sky. No matter what situation comes, Chinese companies will not stand still and will strive to forge a path forward in science and technology.
