It is learned on May 10 from guigu.org that recently, Alibaba announced to join the Linux Foundation AI&Data, and continue to increase investment in AI and big data technology to promote related open source construction.

Alibaba is an active developer of Linux and has previously submitted more than 290 patches for the Linux kernel. In addition to Linux, Alibaba has made outstanding contributions to well-known projects such as MySQL, JVM, and Web server, and is also one of the top five members of the open source organization WebScaleSQL.

Lin Wei, technical director of Alibaba Cloud’s machine learning platform PAI and big data platform, said: “Joining the Linux Foundation AI&Data will help Alibaba understand LF AI&Data more deeply, participate more in discussions on technology and standard formulation, and actively grasp the future direction of big data and AI development”.

This time, while joining the Linux Foundation AI&Data Foundation, Alibaba also actively gave back to the community by donating DeepRec, a high-performance deep learning framework for recommendation scenarios, to the Linux Foundation AI&Data for hosting.

DeepRec is a high-performance deep learning framework for recommendation scenarios open sourced by Alibaba Cloud’s machine learning platform PAI. It provides in-depth performance optimization for sparse models in terms of distribution, graph optimization, operators, and runtime. It also provides search, recommendation, and A series of functions such as unique dynamic elastic features in advertising scenarios, dynamic elastic dimensions, adaptive EmbeddingVariable, incremental model export and loading, etc.

DeepRec is widely used in Taobao, Tmall, Alimama, AutoNavi, Taote, AliExpress, Lazada, etc. within the Alibaba Group. It supports core businesses such as Taobao search, recommendation, and advertising, and supports very large-scale sparse training for hundreds of billions of features and trillions of samples. Since DeepRec was open sourced for more than a year, it has been widely used in search and promotion business scenarios of dozens of companies, bringing huge business value.

Ibrahim Haddad, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation AI&Data, warmly welcomed the announcement, “DeepRec brings innovative solutions to technology projects with its impressive work on deep learning recommendation frameworks. It is a pleasure to collaborate with DeepRec to further develop and enhance this powerful open source technology. With the expertise and resources of the Linux Foundation AI&Data Foundation, join forces to advance the advancement of deep learning and revolutionize the way recommender systems are approached.”

After the donation of DeepRec, Alibaba will continue to maintain and promote DeepRec together with LFAI&Data, create a deep learning framework ecology for search and promotion scenarios, and attract more companies and teams to participate in the use and development of DeepRec. In addition, Alibaba will participate in more open source foundations more actively and openly, and will donate some software projects to the foundation for hosting in due course.