Introduction: As we all know, in major sports events, how to improve the performance of athletes, how to improve the audience’s participation experience, is a problem that sports organizations pay more and more attention to. So how does Aliyun technology help solve this problem? Today, we are honored to invite Li Feifei, vice president of Alibaba Group, head of Ali Cloud Intelligent database product Division and outstanding scientist of ACM, to reveal the dark technology behind the “cloud” of international sports events.

Q: As a data scientist, what data do you focus on most during the competition?

Li Fei Fei: ** As a data scientist, I care about some key indicators of major sporting events. For example, the country or region in which the event is held, the level of competition, that is, how competitive the athletes are, how well they are performing in the same event, whether they are in a leading position, what the audience can expect from them in the competition, what is the track record of key players and so on.

In addition, as a data scientist, I also care about athletes’ physiological data, including their endurance, strength, speed of movement, etc. These are the key indicators for me to predict how they will perform in the game. There are also environmental factors, such as who the crowd is supporting, the weather conditions, and all the things that drive successful sporting events.

Q: We all know that athletes have to train hard for years to compete. Can you share with us how our data technology can help athletes improve their performance during training and make it a better experience for spectators?

** Fei Fei Li: ** We use data-driven data analysis in a number of different ways to guide decision-making and help athletes improve performance during training.

Intel and Alibaba, for example, provide connectivity tools for athletes. The technology is designed to bring greater insight and make athletes’ training more efficient. In the 100-meter dash, for example, we’re using AI-based technology to help athletes and their coaches gain near real-time insights and overlay visualizations that commentators, coaches, and trainees can all leverage.

The technology was developed at Intel’s Silicon Valley headquarters and hosted on Alibaba Cloud infrastructure. It combines computer vision, database technology, and data-driven analytics known as “3DAT” (3D Athlete Tracking) **. The technology uses cameras to capture the race in real time, uses real-time algorithms to analyze the biomechanics of each sprinter’s movements, and combines data generated from replays of the sprint. This allows athletes, coaches and spectators to better enjoy the games, improve training schedules and make real-time data-driven decisions.

In addition to “3DAT” technology, we use a variety of data-driven technologies to help athletes, coaches and spectators improve their performance and experience at major sporting events. For example, we capture game-related data in real time and dump it into a database. Inside the database, we perform sophisticated analysis and real-time data processing to help event organizers, spectators, athletes, coaches and all participants better enjoy the games and make data-driven decisions. For example, how many spectators are watching a particular match, what are the real-time weather conditions, and what are the temporal and spatial conditions associated with the match. These combine not only data-driven technology on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure, but also Internet of Things technology that connects athletes and spectators with the physical world so they can better interact during the games. These combine to give participants an unparalleled experience at a major sporting event.

Q: How does Alibaba Cloud support large sports events?

** Li Fei Fei: ** AliYun is committed to providing world-leading database products and technologies to improve the operational efficiency and effectiveness of major sports events, thereby enhancing the experience of athletes, spectators and staff. By supporting this major sporting event, we are demonstrating how database technology, especially cloud-native database products and technologies, can revolutionize different industries.

A large-scale sports event is a complex project involving dozens of functional departments such as competition, technology, logistics, transportation and media operation. A major sporting event often takes the host city nearly a decade to prepare, striving to make every aspect perfect. The key to doing this successfully is to take all the data associated with the game and digitize the process. That said, digitalization is critical. Dozens of functional departments rely on the high performance of cloud-native database technology to make all real-time data decisions, providing useful insights for departmental collaboration, operations, and data analysis to help athletes, spectators, event organizers, and others better participate in organizing games.

To this end, AliCloud database products, including our RDS, NoSQL database, PolarDB, and AnalyticDB, are used to support complex event management systems for large sports events, such as competition schedule services, logistics operations, and all events operation related matters. This is crucial for major sporting events, and is the infrastructure for them to be held smoothly.

All data related to the event are written and processed in real time on the Aliyun database platform. This ensures that data is 100% secure, 100% reliable and processed in real time on AliYun RDS. We ensure high availability, resilience, and horizontal scalability across AZs. All of these key features are essential to the successful operation of a large and complex sporting event. In addition, we offer data warehouse solutions such as AnalyticDB, our cloud-based native data warehouse, to help athletes and event organizers make better decisions and gain insights from the data collected. In summary, we provide a one-stop solution for the entire lifecycle of data management for large and complex sports events.

Q: Could you summarize the advantages of Aliyun database for us?

** Li Fei Fei: ** Ariyun Database is one of the global leaders in database products and technologies, especially in the area of cloud native database products and technologies. Just like the famous Olympic slogan “Higher, Faster, Stronger”, the aliyun database slogan is “Faster, more stable, more secure”. We continue to make significant progress in responding to customer needs, we pay close attention to customer needs, incorporate customer feedback into our product development cycle for world-leading database technology, and are committed to providing our customers with the best cloud native database products.

In fact, we entered the Leadership quadrant in the 2020 Magic Quadrant evaluation of Gartner’s global database. Alibaba cloud database market share ranked first in the Asia-Pacific region, ranked fourth among all cloud suppliers in the world, and undoubtedly ranked first in the Chinese market. Our technology is one of the most advanced in the industry, for example, our cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB entered the “Strong Performer” quadrant in Forrester Wave’s latest Cloud Data Warehouse research report, and we ranked first in the industry’s widely accepted standard TPC-DS benchmark. This benchmark is used to evaluate the performance and cost-effectiveness of a data warehouse product.

Integrating all our products from relational database, data warehouse to NoSQL database, Aliyun Database provides one-stop full-link database management and services. We can meet customers’ needs throughout the data management lifecycle, from data production and integration to real-time data processing and storage, to data analysis and discovery, and finally to data development and management.

During the data production and integration phase, our DTS, DBS and DMS stand for data transmission services, database backup services, and data Management services, respectively, providing a one-stop solution from source to any destination. In between, we provide ETL and other overall functionality for the convenience of our customers.

In terms of real-time data processing and storage, PolarDB, our cloud native relational database, and RDS, our cloud database service, provide cloud native solutions to help build enterprise data management solutions. Combined with autonomous services, customers can experience the best cloud native database services on our cloud platform.

Finally, in terms of data analysis and discovery, AnalyticDB, our cloud-native data warehouse, helps customers gain data-driven insights from all the data they collect. With our data management service DMS, you can manage all of the aforementioned services and products, whether relational or NoSQL databases. Our data warehouse provides a one-stop unified user interface and platform to meet all requirements related to the full data management life cycle, such as data development, security issues, workflow management, etc.

That’s all I want to share with you today. I hope you find what I’ve shared today helpful when watching any major sporting event, and you can find more information about aliyun’s database on our website and other channels.

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