Alibaba’s Big Data Applications in Urban Governance and Social Risk Prevention

Editor's note: This article is reprinted from the official WeChat account of Chang'an Magazine.

Jack Ma, Chairman of Alibaba Group, delivered a lecture titled “The Role of Technological Innovation in Future Social Governance,” inspiring law‑enforcement officials with examples of how big data can identify criminals and assist policing.

“City Brain”: Using Data to Create Value

In March, the Hangzhou municipal government launched the “City Brain” project, involving 13 leading domestic companies, including Alibaba Cloud, and top AI scientists. The initiative aggregates scattered data across the city and applies cloud computing, big data, and AI to enable city functions to work together like an organic, self‑regulating system.

The “City Brain” consists of five subsystems: a massive‑scale computing platform, a data collection system, a data exchange center, an open algorithm platform, and a data application platform.

Hundreds of billions of data points from traffic management, public services, telecom operators, and the internet are centralized, forming the foundation of a smart city. Using this data, a virtual digital city is built where machine‑learning models continuously optimize solutions such as traffic‑light timing, left‑turn restrictions, bus scheduling, and road‑construction planning.

Wang Jian, Chairman of Alibaba’s Technical Committee, humorously noted that the greatest distance is between traffic lights and monitoring cameras, which sit on the same pole yet have never been linked by data, leading to historically vague traffic decisions.

By incorporating map and camera data, “City Brain” gains a “sky‑eye” perspective, while Alibaba Cloud’s proprietary network‑flow control theory quantifies network congestion points.

In September, the traffic module was deployed in Xiaoshan District, showing a 3‑5% average increase in vehicle speed (up to 11% on certain roads) through intelligent traffic‑light adjustments.

Future applications include providing traffic solutions for large events (e.g., concerts), personalized tourism services, and proactive flood‑risk prediction for reservoirs and waterways.

The ultimate goal is to become the city’s AI hub, allowing data to assist the city in thinking and decision‑making.

Alibaba Big Data in Social Risk Prevention

Smart security: During the G20 summit, big data enabled real‑time monitoring, prediction, and rapid response to threats.

Smart traffic: Amap’s data not only offers navigation but also optimizes travel routes and automatically diverts traffic to avoid congestion.

Smart search: Behavioral data analysis helps identify individuals and supports law‑enforcement in crime prevention.

Smart black‑gray industry chain mining: Millisecond‑level real‑time calculations and visualization monitor platform anomalies, predict risks, and trigger alerts.

Smart counterfeit detection: Real‑time monitoring plus volunteer verification can analyze 100 million data points per second, having intercepted over 1.2 billion counterfeit items and mapped 3 518 counterfeit groups.

Internet + anti‑trafficking: The DingTalk “Tuanyuan” system uses Amap LBS data to push precise missing‑child alerts, achieving a 91% recovery rate for reported cases.

QianDun anti‑fraud platform: Provides pre‑warning, interception, and emergency response for telecom fraud, protecting consumers and merchants.

How the World‑Class “Strongest Brain” Was Forged

Alibaba’s e‑commerce platform now hosts over one billion product listings. After eight years of Double‑11 testing, Alibaba built a risk‑control system that scans all items in ten minutes, analyzing them across hundreds of dimensions to detect violations.

The system leverages proprietary image‑recognition, tagging, data‑analysis, and OCR technologies; if printed, the stacked product catalog would reach 44 km, equivalent to five Mount Everests.

For example, completing a purchase on Taobao takes less than a second, with only 0.5 seconds allocated to big‑data security checks that perform hundreds of risk assessments across account, device, credit, behavior, and content dimensions.

Behind the scenes, real‑time computing processes nearly a trillion events daily, handling up to one million events per second and over 300 000 events in a blink.

Since 2005, Alibaba’s Security Department has established comprehensive account safety, information protection, and anti‑fraud mechanisms, collaborating closely with industry regulators and law‑enforcement agencies.

Today, by processing hundreds of petabytes of data, Alibaba’s “Strongest Brain” monitors online crime clues, visualizes data, predicts and manages risks for the billion‑product ecosystem, striving to keep the platform safe for billions of users.

Jack Ma emphasizes that Alibaba exists to solve societal problems, maintaining a public‑welfare mission and continuously innovating to address the challenges of social governance.