Dan Lingjun has something to say: Accelerating digital transformation has become the consensus of all walks of life around the world. The epidemic has further promoted the development of digital technologies, and enterprises are actively seeking their own transformation in the process of responding to challenges, recovering and developing, and reconstructing to win the future. As a platform technology company, Microsoft continues to cultivate a diversified growth team, encourage employees to expand boundaries, and help customers and partners grow resiliently.
As the head of the natural language processing team and the chief R&D director of Microsoft (Asia) Internet Engineering Institute, Dr. Yang Yang has long led the team to integrate the development results into Microsoft's full range of products and serve global users. The natural language understanding model they trained and deployed was applied to products including bing search engines, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Cloud Cognitive Services, and more.
Dr. Yang Yang, Head of Natural Language Processing Team and Chief R&D Director of Microsoft Internet Engineering Institute (Asia).
Two years ago, Dr. Yang Yang already saw more and more digital transformation needs of local enterprises. As a core R&D personnel, in addition to doing a good job in global product development, Dr. Yang Yang led the engineering team to step into the front line of the market, communicate with practitioners in various fields in depth, integrate Microsoft's experience and practice, and polish the Carina artificial intelligence and natural language processing platform for Customers in the Chinese market, a highly flexible, modular, and customizable "full-stack intelligent solution". At present, Carina has landed in a number of enterprises in the fields of domestic finance, automobile manufacturing, real estate and other fields, providing enabling means for the intelligent transformation of Chinese enterprises with different demands. Recently, due to the outstanding performance of the Carina platform in the financial field, Microsoft was honored in the 5th World Intelligence Conference FSF100 Digital Financial Competitiveness Excellence List "2020 Financial Institutions Digital And Intelligent Transformation Outstanding Supplier Top List", and Dr. Yang Yang was honored as the "2020 Fintech Outstanding People TOP List" by shouldering the CIOs of many large financial institutions.
Yang Yang graduated from Peking University majoring in Computer Science and Technology, and later went to the United States for further studies, majoring in computer engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Doing technological innovation that can solve the pain points of the actual industry is Yang Yang's ambition. In 2008, after graduating with a Ph.D., he joined Microsoft. For more than a decade, almost every paper written by Yang Yang has been the primary consideration for the industry to learn from. Yang Yang shared: "To do technology application, valuable innovation, it is very important to maintain an open and inclusive mind and growth mindset. Industry demand is always changing, we must not do a 'hammer' to find a 'nail', but to gain insight into the pain points and prescribe the right medicine. ”
In the tide of digital transformation, every enterprise needs to quickly adopt leading technologies and have the digital capabilities to build its own capabilities. However, digital and intelligent transformation is easier said than done, and many enterprises are afraid of the high threshold of artificial intelligence.
In the process of dabbling in the engineering transformation of technology in the industry and visiting customers one by one, Yang Yang and his team deeply realized that although many enterprises have their own IT teams and data engineers, the development of artificial intelligence platforms and algorithms contains many complex technical capabilities, and the threshold for research and development is very high. Artificial intelligence's understanding of natural language currently requires delineating scenarios and clarifying specific goals. However, the scenes are not interoperable, and the data is not related. If a company wants to apply these technologies, it can only design different models one by one, or borrow existing models, which are difficult to design and apply, and are prone to compatibility problems.
Therefore, Yang Yang and the team tried to transfer Microsoft's artificial intelligence technology capabilities to customers in the form of tool desks, and created a Carina artificial intelligence and natural language processing platform based on Microsoft intelligent cloud computing for Customers in the Chinese market, so that enterprises can easily realize artificial intelligence model training and release management in the form of "drag and drop", low-code work, solve actual business problems, and form their own technology precipitation.
Dr. Yang Yang took a group photo with some members of the team
Carina is composed of five supporting platforms, including artificial intelligence basic platform, big data platform, and operation monitoring platform, as well as nine capability tool platforms such as text analysis, knowledge graph, natural language understanding (NLU), information retrieval-based question answering system (IR-QA), knowledge base-based question answering system (KB-QA), and OCR. Carina also links Microsoft's existing technologies and product capabilities, such as Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Power Platform, etc., to support public cloud, hybrid cloud, and private cloud deployments.
Carina was quickly recognized by its customers. Since its inception in 2019, a number of banking and securities institutions have used the Carina platform as a core technology solution to provide full-scenario empowerment for institutional financial business and jointly create a "smart brain". With the increasing number of carina application scenarios in these institutions, the transformation of enterprise AI has achieved initial results, realizing unified data models, intelligent algorithms and intelligent application coverage of multiple scenarios, and promoting various business, operation and management, IT support, marketing and other scenarios to fully enter the AI-driven era.
When the epidemic suddenly broke out in 2020, two weeks after the "lockdown" of Wuhan, Carina's team received a request for help from a provincial capital city: the city's mayor's hotline was affected by the epidemic, the workload increased nearly threefold compared with the past, and the overloaded work of the operators could not alleviate the problem of line congestion, and ai support was urgently needed. The mayor's hotline, set up by Carina in 2019, is designed with a variety of calls frequently asked by citizens, and machines can be expanded at low cost to access as many phones as possible. However, the epidemic has brought new challenges, the system does not yet have epidemic-related customer service data, and the project needs to be started without data.
Yang Yang and his team rushed to work overnight to collect information on the city's government functional departments and medical systems related to the epidemic, and formulated a new Q&A process for intelligent voice customer service according to the logic of ordinary people's questions. Carina's deep learning capabilities worked, and the more calls were answered, the more optimized the model of semantic understanding and the more accurate the answers became. Within three days, intelligent voice customer service has undertaken nearly half of the customer service work.
In Yang Yang's view, innovation has no boundaries. Carina's innovation and development is born out of Microsoft's artificial intelligence practice and nourished by Microsoft's innovation culture.
When Yang Yang and the team saw that more and more traditional enterprises were seeking to use digital technology to achieve business transformation and growth, but had not yet figured out the method, he hoped to organically integrate Microsoft's artificial intelligence and natural language processing related experience and practices to empower customers, so he was full of enthusiasm and collaborated with Microsoft's internal and external resources to form the prototype of the Carina platform; in the communication with front-line customers in various industries, the team constantly refreshed the understanding of market pain points and needs. At the same time, all the acquisitions in the service of customers are used to feed back the development and growth of more products and services within Microsoft.
Yang Yang stressed, "I often share with the team that innovation requires agility and resilience, to be able to understand the needs, always ready to embrace change, and keep an open mind is very important." How to combine new technologies with real scenarios and needs, truly promote the development and growth of products, business, efficiency and revenue, and enhance the resilience and vitality of enterprise development is a problem that more and more enterprises are thinking about. Therefore, Microsoft and Carina have always been on the road to innovation. ”