Much as a school views its educational mission from the perspective of shaping young minds, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. sees its role in the computing universe as that of building functioning, thinking machines. Alibaba Cloud has developed a set of machine learning-fueled platforms, such as ET City Brain and ET Industrial Brain, to solve many of the world’s most complex problems. And the company is making this technology available to young minds as well.

“This is the part we want to share with the younger generation, telling them to unleash their creativity and unleash their imagination,” said Min Wanli (pictured), chief data scientist and general manager, Big Data Division, at Alibaba Cloud. “Don’t worry about the hard-coded part. Imagine anything possible, and then use ET Brain to try and explore that.”

Wanli visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with host John Furrier (@furrier) during The Computing Conference in Hangzhou, China. They discussed how machine learning can help solve societal problems, the importance of tracking data in real time, and the blending of big data with cloud applications to deliver enterprise solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Earlier this year, Alibaba released version 2.0 of its PAI machine learning service, which is integrated into its various ET Brain platforms. The latest version includes more than 100 algorithms with support for numerous deep learning frameworks.

Finding new solutions to old problems

With this kind of computer analytics, Alibaba hopes to encourage new solutions to old problems. “The best scenario is if you can prevent a traffic jam from happening in the first place,” Wanli said. “That’s the goal of ET Brain in traffic management.”

In addition to its machine learning initiatives, Alibaba’s strategy is solidly grounded in the marriage of cloud technology with big data management and analytics. This has helped power the company’s formidable e-commerce platform, where it evaluates consumer intent through experiences such as image browsing and generates a suggested purchase that will hopefully result in a merchant sale.

“These consumer behaviors are translated as data, and this data will be further merged with archive data,” Wanli explained. “If the match is good then we’ll flash this to the top priority to try to increase the conversion rate.”

Alibaba is also following the shift from ingesting massive amounts of data and then archiving it for later study to performing on-the-spot analytics in real time. “We are not only doing the cloud; we are blending the cloud and big data vertical solutions,” Wanli said. “These days, if you have cloud computing available, you can do real-time analytics to unleash the value in the first moment you receive the data.”

Here’s the complete video interview, and there’s more SiliconANGLE and theCUBE coverage of The Computing Conference. (* Disclosure: Coverage of the Alibaba Cloud Computing Conference is sponsored by Intel. All content is controlled by SiliconANGLE, and neither Intel nor Alibaba have editorial influence on the coverage.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE