Ant Technology Exploration Conference 2018

Ant Technology Exploration Conference is hosted in Santa Clara to see computing, IoT, security, machine intelligence, and blockchain become foundational to the future digital world.

To summarize, Ant Finance Tech’s biggest challenges are in processing real-time large-scale data considering security and privacy issues. Ant Finance is looking forward to using IoT, blockchain, and AI (especially face recognition) to build the next generation of China’s ePay.

The blockchain is gradually put into the real application based on its ability to build trust with decentralization. In my opinion, Ant Finance has found several really good use cases of blockchain and is on the right track of using it to build trust instead of bitcoin which is disrupting trust.

Some other thoughts:

1. Edge computing may be a solution to processing real-time data and taking security privacy issues into consideration as well by using Google’s federated learning solution.
2. Who do you really trust and is blockchain really decentralized? Thinking that:
   1. When you donate to ant financial donation which tells you they are using blockchain to track money, for what do you decide to believe? For trusting ant financial company or the blockchain itself?
   2. The blockchain is nominated to be “decentralized”, but ant blockchain, built by ant financial, can still be controlled by its builder. Is a decentralized tech built by a certain centralized big company still decentralized?

View use cases in detail below.

Ant Financial Equality

• Three challenges
  • Large data: large transaction data processing at a large scale 250,000 QPS
  • Real-time: each transaction less than 500ms
  • Security: low error tolerance and high-security requirement

Intelligent marketing by reinforcement learning

• Ads click rate
• Merge several resources
• Personal ad recommendations
  • E.g. skinny jeans cause phone screen break, recommend insurance on phone screen

Ant Blockchain

• Use cases
  • Charity, cash flow tracking, and security, From donor to beneficiary, timely, immutable, and end to end transparent.
  • Trust life mutual, cash flow tracking and recording
  • Supplier chain provenance, baby milk supplier tracking from Australia to China with time stamp

Ant Architecture Innovation

1. A certain user’s data is stored on the same server to ensure real-time data fetching and process when paying. It makes the server scalable and prompt response. (Very much like google file system by saving each user’s information in a data block on server)
2. Marketing decision-making system. Training system with historical data and rules to be used as the decision maker in the future.
3. Infrastructure is changing with the rapid development of AI
4. Future challenges in infrastructure
   1. Real real-time
   2. Maximize computing power
   3. Lowest cost
   4. Optimize for AI (and other new techs) experience

In all, the ATEC is a well designed and well-organized conference sharing insights and making the impact. It’s overall a great experience to attend this event. View the slides photos from original post: LINK