At Alibaba, Artificial Intelligence is Changing How People Shop Online - Alizila

In implementing AI, Alibaba is applying numerous complex machine-learning methods and disciplines, such as online machine learning, transfer learning, deep learning, artificial neural networks and reinforcement learning. The latter mimics the way the human brain learns through experience. Simply put, the computer "learns" to recognize patterns in data that lead to right and wrong answers through an iterative process, similar to the way a child learns by trial-and-error to throw a ball. This technology depends on the creation of software algorithms that enable computers to reach correct conclusions by being fed huge numbers of examples, building up a base of "experiences" that can be applied to recognize patterns and solve problems in new situations. These learning machines become smarter and more accurate as they are given more and more data. This means Alibaba, with its vast computer resources and access to online data from hundreds of millions of consumers, is well positioned to introduce practical, real-world AI applications into everyday use. The company over the last 17 years has built up one of the world's largest distributed-computing networks, allowing it to marshall the computational horsepower necessary for AI. Alibaba's cloud computing subsidiary, one of the world's top 5 public cloud providers, has developed an operating system called Apsara that organizes data centers into a computational engine that can process more than 175,000 transactions a second.