Alibaba's Damo Academy kicks off operations at new unit, with goal to recruit and train over 100 postdoctoral researchers in next three years

Alibaba Group Holding's Damo Academy has established a new research unit, which started recruiting the first batch of more than 100 postdoctoral candidates it aims to train, marking the Chinese e-commerce giant's latest push to expand its global research programme in cutting-edge technologies.

The new research unit will support these candidates' postdoctoral work across various fields including artificial intelligence (AI) and semiconductors, according to a statement on Tuesday posted on Damo's official WeChat account.

It is affiliated with Damo's Hupan Lab, also known as the Zhejiang Province Lab of Data Science and Application, that promotes the real-world use of innovations from areas including computer vision, natural language understanding and so-called decision intelligence.

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Damo expects to recruit 30 postdoctoral candidates for the new unit in 2024, as part of a plan to train more than 100 such researchers in the next three years, according to You Haiyan, chief talent officer at the academy.

An aerial view of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding's headquarters in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, taken on November 28, 2023. Photo: Agence France-Presse alt=An aerial view of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding's headquarters in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province, taken on November 28, 2023. Photo: Agence France-Presse>

The postdoctoral researchers will each receive a 1 million yuan (US$140,000) award when they graduate and choose to work in the Yuhang district of Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, is headquartered in Hangzhou.

Damo's latest recruitment initiative is expected to bolster Alibaba's major initiatives in AI, which include a large language model (LLM) tailored for Southeast Asian languages, providing free public access to 100 AI patents and hiring life intelligence scientists for "smart breeding" in agriculture.

The first batch of recruits in the new research unit are doing work on the use of AI LLMs - the technology used to train ChatGPT and similar services - in oncotherapy, as well as in multimodal data generation and advanced video-compression technologies, according to Damo's statement.

To attract more recruits, the academy is offering more frontier research topics for candidates to work on, a vast computing infrastructure, coaching from science fellows and resources to help adopt scientific discoveries into practical applications.

Alibaba founded Damo in late 2017 as a global research institute for scientific innovation and its application in solving real-world problems. Through Damo, Alibaba is bankrolling various frontier research work, with the aim to integrate and speed up knowledge exchange between science and industry.

Apart from facilities in Hangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Damo also has operations in Singapore as well as in Seattle, Sunnyvale and New York in the United States.

Damo has also established deep ties with various academic institutions around the world. The institute has partnered with more than 100 universities across 20 countries.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

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