Why Alibaba’s Li Fei‑Fei Earned the ACM Distinguished Scientist Honor

On November 8, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced its 2018 list of ACM Distinguished Scientists, and Professor Li Fei‑Fei, chief scientist of the DAMO Academy’s database division and head of Alibaba’s database business, was selected.

ACM is the world’s oldest, largest, and most authoritative professional computing society, and it awards the famous Turing Award. ACM Distinguished Scientists are researchers who have made major achievements and impact in computing.

Dam​o Academy’s database chief scientist Li Fei‑Fei shares a name with Stanford AI professor Fei‑Fei Li, but the “male” Li Fei‑Fei has achieved comparable stature in computer science.

Previously, as a tenured professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Utah and a world‑class database systems expert, he repeatedly received the most influential paper awards from IEEE and ACM in the database field.

In 2018, Professor Li Fei‑Fei declined offers from multiple multinational companies and prestigious universities to join Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, leading a team to pursue research with independent intellectual property, including next‑generation distributed databases, unstructured data management, and data security, aiming to elevate China’s database technology to the international forefront and break the monopoly of a few vendors on core database technology.

The ACM Distinguished Scientist award also recognizes the research level and achievements of the DAMO Academy.

Currently, the new‑generation distributed database system developed by Alibaba’s database division, led by Professor Li Fei‑Fei, supports Alibaba Group’s complex services, massive data, and the Double‑11 shopping festival peak, and has been applied to smart‑city traffic network management in multiple cities, enabling instantaneous retrieval and analysis of tens of millions of smart terminal data.

Additionally, China’s national meteorological big‑data analysis platform uses this technology to achieve millisecond‑level weather data queries and analysis, storing minute‑level data from over 60,000 weather stations since 1957.

Data’s value to the digital economy is evident; in recent years, Alibaba’s DAMO Academy has incubated world‑class database technology. Alibaba CTO and DAMO Academy director Zhang Jianfeng noted that Alibaba’s digital economy has accumulated massive application data, and to better exploit this data, Alibaba has built world‑class infrastructure and launched a series of independent innovations.