CHINA technology giant Alibaba is developing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics to help address global humanitarian issues especially poverty.
The company has established the Alibaba Poverty Relief Programme to alleviate poverty, with the help of advanced technologies today.
The programme focuses on improving lives by providing education, empowering women in the community, improving healthcare and environmental sustainability to underserved community.
Just like the saying “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,” the programme aims at developing rural commerce advancement, ensuring a sustainable livelihood, in line with the company’s mission of making it easy to do business anywhere.
The company has been sharing its expertise with the United Nations World Food Programme, an organisation with experience in humanitarian and community development, since 2017.
Together, they target to end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition among the affected people by 2030.
The organisation provides assistance to 86.7 million people in 83 countries yearly.
THE MISSION
Both parties have been working on a poverty alleviation project, connecting smallholder farmers in Anhui, a province in Eastern China.
The programme offers solutions to the people of Anhui so that they can directly market their produce such as kiwi fruit through an e-commerce channel.
This gives the farmers access to obtain better prices for their agricultural produce, hence uplifting the household economy.
In line with the aims of the World Food Programme to help vulnerable people face the challenges, HungerMap LIVE was introduced.
Announced by David Beasly, executive director at United Nations WFP during the recent UN General Assembly in New York, HungerMap LIVE is a ground-breaking global hunger monitoring system that uses AI, machine learning and data analytics to both predict and track the magnitude and severity of hunger in over 90 countries in close to real-time.
Machine learning is the forefront technology used on site to produce predictions on food security (the availability of food and one’s access to it) even in areas where data is not sufficiently available.
The site is equipped with advanced data visualisation tools to convert the result by providing in-depth analysis of food security at the global, country and sub-national levels, and place it on display on an interactive map.
“We are excited to provide our leading technology and resources to World Food Programme in the journey to fight hunger. Launching Hunger Map LIVE is only the first step,” says Lijun Sun, partner and chairman of the Alibaba Foundation.
LONG-TERM COMMITMENT
By having the most up-to-date information on food security on one central platform, the World Food Programme can now monitor progress and identify negative trends at an early stage.
This will enable better and well-informed decision-making to improve efficiency such as response time during emergency assistance and the curtailing costs in the effort to fight world hunger.
“Food insecurity is usually measured in a static way even though we know that it is dynamic because it changes all the time.
“With the application of this technology, the global community has access to daily food insecurity estimates, and that is revolutionary,” says Beasly, adding that the HungerMap LIVE serves as a visual wake-up call every day by showing real-time snapshot of the problem and it reminds everyone what needs to be done to address the hunger issue.
The man behind food security data and analysis, Arif Husain, who is also chief economist and director of the World Food Programme, believes that the streams of publicly available information help the organisation in spreading awareness on the current hunger situation.
The interactive map shows data on food security, nutrition, conflict, weather and a variety of macro-economic data including from the programme in one place to show a holistic picture of the current food security situation around the world.
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
The HungerMap LIVE launch marks the first milestone in the long-term partnership signed last year that aims to bring together the World Food Programme and Alibaba’s expertise to support efforts to achieve a world free of hunger by 2030.
“The HungerMap LIVE demonstrates the commitment to digital transformation, working strategically with partners like Alibaba to use technology in ways that help us become more efficient and effective.
“We started this strategic partnership with Alibaba because we know that in the digital age, cooperation with the technology sector is critical. We need to continuously explore the latest technologies, newest ideas and build lasting synergies with partners to help us reach those furthest behind,” says Beasley.
Sun says Alibaba has developed a leading technological ecosystem, and by working with the experts from the programme, the company can see a new perspective.
“This aligns with our vision of using technology to create a better world,” he says, adding that the live map will be accessible to the public from Wednesday on World Food Day at Hungermap.wfp.org.
BETTER LIVING
Fighting world hunger is not the only world issue Alibaba is set to solve.
The Alibaba AI Platform runs over one trillion tasks every day, processing billion of images, more than one million hours of videos, 550,000 hours of voice messages and 500 billion natural language sentences, serving over a billion people around the world.
Most of the data come from City Brain, a smart city initiative by Alibaba Cloud.
The City brain initiative utilises comprehensive real-time data from machine intelligence on a city to provide solution for defects in urban operations and to optimise resources.
The solutions have been deployed in Alibaba’s home city Hangzhou and other cities in China such as Suzhou, Shanghai and Macau.
“Transportation, security, municipal construction and urban planning are some of the issues the largest public artificial intelligence system is working to solve.
“Traffic is always the best place to start because the data is in abundance and from there we will come up with solutions to solve the problems,” says Yangqing Jia, president and senior fellow of the data platform at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
Since the implementation of Alibaba Cloud’s City Brain solution in Hangzhou, the city’s response time for emergency has significantly decreased to 92 per cent.
Outside of China, Malaysia is the first country to adapt the smart city system developed by Alibaba Cloud, where a smart city initiative called Malaysia City Brain was established last year.
One of the project objectives is to address the worrying traffic issues in Malaysia.
In May this year, Alibaba Cloud announced collaboration with Sena Traffic System to develop and deploy smart traffic solutions here.
Based on the data collected on the first phase of the pilot project which was carried out in Kuala Lumpur for nine months, it was revealed a 12 per cent possible reduction of travel time for road users can be achieved with proper implementation of the system.
By utilising real-time information derived from loop detector, traffic lights information and traffic cameras, Alibaba Cloud calculates instances to offer traffic solutions.
The Malaysia City Brain will roll out next year.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Traffic and poverty issues not just the issues that technology can address.
Since its inception a decade ago, Alibaba Cloud has been running one of the largest AI stacks in the world for its Apsara AI platform.
The AI-powered Cloud builds on years of industry experience and provides to more than 40 business units from within the Alibaba ecosystem.
On the local front, Alibaba Cloud is the only international cloud service provider in Malaysia to run a local data centre since October 2017, providing enterprises a choice to build businesses.
A second availability zone gives local businesses the ability to run applications on a powerful, reliable and secured global cloud platform.
Alibaba Cloud is used by several leading Malaysian enterprises such as Bank Muamalat, Air Asia, Genting, PNB, Sena Traffic Systems, Atilize, CIMB and TouchnGo to accelerate their digital transformation journey.
The digitalisation effort did not end with SMEs. Last August, Alibaba launched its first cloud-based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Centre in Malaysia to mitigate risks and offer customers the highest level of protection against stronger DDoS attacks.
The centre will enhance the existing infrastructure, offering support to Malaysia’s digital economy ambitions.