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Zheng Yu, vice president of JD Digital: Every city must have an operating system, and its core is that urban computing "must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry" left-handed management and right-handed academics

author:DeepTech

"China's rise requires someone to speak out for China and stand guard for China in the world. If all international standards and technical systems were set by Europeans and Americans, China would lose its voice. The person who said this was Zheng Yu, a "city calculation" evangelist who has appeared on programs such as "Every Day Upward" and "Hundred Family Pulpits".

Recently, he has just been selected as the IEEE 2021 Fellow of the Year, and he is also the vice president of JD Digital, the general manager of the smart city department, and the editor-in-chief of acm tist, an international authoritative journal on artificial intelligence. Talking about the original intention of being responsible for the journal, he said: "In many fields, we started relatively late, so we were stuck in the neck and used various patent standards to restrict us. However, under the premise of serving the company well, serving the Chinese society and the international community, there must also be someone to stand on this post for the Chinese people in the international community. ”

Zheng Yu, vice president of JD Digital: Every city must have an operating system, and its core is that urban computing "must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry" left-handed management and right-handed academics

Figure | Zheng Yu was in the Baijia Pulpit

Zheng Yu, 41 years old this year, is a local doctor, after graduating from Southwest Jiaotong University, he came to Microsoft Research Asia for 12 years, during which he published more than 100 papers, won the Best Paper Award of the International Summit 5 times, and his papers have been cited more than 31,000 times.

2019 is his second year in JD.com, and although he has been less involved in paper research in recent years, his papers have been cited more than 5,000 times last year; in the Google Academic Rankings, he ranked first in the world in both urban computing and spatio-temporal data mining.

There are not many "big factory executives" who are particularly knowledgeable about academics, and the editors who work part-time with him at acm tist are mostly quite heavy-named, Hua Xiansheng and Tao Dacheng. Being the editor-in-chief of a journal is not a profitable job, but he enjoys it.

As early as 2013, he was named the Global Outstanding Young Innovator (tr35) global winner by MIT Technology Review for his contribution to "urban computing", and he was also the only second winner in China that year.

City calculation sounds far away, but close to us. In the cross-Chinese New Year's Eve of 2014, when a stampede occurred on the Bund in Shanghai, Zheng Yu called on Weibo at the time to "avoid the stampede tragedy by detecting urban anomalies based on mobile phone data", saying that if he could send a message to the user's mobile phone in advance to remind them that there were too many people that night, the tragedy might have been avoided.

At that time, Zheng Yu was also a research fellow at Microsoft Research Asia, and it was this accident that made him determined to deepen urban computing. He said that if the city calculation is compared to a flour machine, the data of each city department is wheat, and the digital gateway technology can ensure that the wheat of each department is ground into flour and made into steamed buns under the premise of not seeing the wheat, so that the original data of each department can be "stayed at home" and can be safely interconnected.

Zheng Yu's current JD Digital Smart City sounds far from the C-end, but he said: "Liu Zong (Liu Qiangdong) has always told us that we must create long-term value for society and the country, and we must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry in order to create real value, rather than doing that kind of short-term fast money." ”

Just as mobile phones and computers must also have operating systems, each city has its own operating system, and its core is urban computing. The urban operating system includes one or more urban computing platforms, if the city is compared to a super-large computer, the urban operating system is like the former's windows, intelligent transportation, intelligent planning and other solutions are office and other applications.

Zheng Yu, vice president of JD Digital: Every city must have an operating system, and its core is that urban computing "must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry" left-handed management and right-handed academics

Figure | Smart city operating system

At present, the city operating system has been used in the construction of smart cities in Xiong'an New Area and Nantong. Taking the Nantong Municipal Governance Modernization Command Center built on the basis of the urban operating system as an example, before the Nantong Urban Management Law Enforcement Personnel were all peripheral law enforcement, sometimes law enforcement personnel would clash with the illegal stall owners, but the illegal stalls would cause damage to others, so they must be governed. At the same time as the legal system, there must also be warmth. For many stall owners, perhaps a small stall is the source of the family's income.

Chen Jian, deputy director of the Supervision Department of the Nantong Municipal Chengguan Bureau, once said that as a chengguan personnel, he needs to scrupulously perform his duties; as an ordinary person, he also understands that it is not easy to make a living. So, is it possible for urban management work to change from law enforcement to service?

Later, after Nantong used the urban management self-built probe and the urban "Xueliang Project" probe, the occupation of the road operation and the mobile stalls can achieve intelligent grasping, and then the urban system will receive a notification. This kind of "digital urban management" can write all the urban management data and experience into the "urban management map", just like a U disk inserted into the urban wisdom brain can be used.

Nantong is a port city and also the "textile capital of China", which is why it consumes a lot of chemical raw materials every year. Sometimes, these raw materials have to be loaded with specialized hazardous vehicles. The local transportation department usually requires dangerous goods transport vehicles to release the on-board equipment data device, but before the driver reported the transportation route, the public security department did not grasp the GPS data, and in the past, it could only coordinate with the local traffic police through bayonet video, because it was difficult to carry out good monitoring.

After the opening of the command center for the modernization of urban governance, the public security department can grasp the legal transportation route, and combined with the road network data and real-time GPS data, the trajectory analysis behind the vehicle can be realized. A car from the road, the system will be on the GPS and the road network to do matching, if the vehicle does not drive according to the prescribed route or improper stop, the system will issue an early warning, public security and public security departments can supervise the police.

Zheng Yu, vice president of JD Digital: Every city must have an operating system, and its core is that urban computing "must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry" left-handed management and right-handed academics

Figure | Zheng Yu released the platform for the modernization of urban governance at the JD Global Technology Explorer Conference

It is reported that since the system was launched in March, a total of 1817 early warnings have been issued, 848 enterprise license data have been abnormal, and 296 vehicle abnormal residence points have been issued, of which 296 vehicle abnormal residence points and 91 "small chemical enterprises" requiring rectification have successfully matched 64.

Zheng Yu, vice president of JD Digital: Every city must have an operating system, and its core is that urban computing "must solve the most bitter and tiring things in the industry" left-handed management and right-handed academics

Figure | Law enforcement departments investigate and punish illegal dangerous chemical enterprises based on intelligent traffic data

Behind the above two cases, there is a figure of Zheng Yu. Up to now, he and his team have published 28 papers in the top journal and the top conference, and have applied for more than 30 invention patents.

In November 2020, he co-authored the paper T-Drive: Driving Directions based on taxi trajectories, which won the "Ten Years of Impact Paper Award" from ACM Sigspatial, which is the second consecutive year he has received the award.

In 2019, Zheng Yu co-authored the map-matching for low-sampling-rate gps trajectories, which also won the above award, in which a GPS-loaded taxi can become a mobile sensor that detects traffic flow, and drivers can find the fastest route to their destination according to their common sense reserves.

During the study, Zheng Yuhe and his team spent three months generating a batch of trajectory datasets from 33,000 taxis and digging into the direction of intelligent driving. The final implementation can be based on the user's departure time to help users find the fastest route to their destination. The comparison found that half of the routes planned by the technology were at least 20% faster than the routes planned by similar products. Nowadays, the maps-matching, noise filtering and other technologies in the article have become important basic capabilities in the spatio-temporal data engine handled by Zheng Yu.

The role of combining academia and business has also allowed Zheng Yu to always uphold the principle of "standing up to the sky" in academia, "top the sky" refers to the high degree of theory and can be recognized by international colleagues, and "standing up" refers to the ability to transform research into productivity.

Many people know him as a scholar-type executive, but he is also a teacher who has been preaching and solving problems, and from time to time students leave messages on his Weibo.

While at Microsoft, he was a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He told DeepTech that Microsoft's work has built a bridge between industry and academia, and has also shaped his semi-academic and semi-commercial temperament. At that time, the working environment of Microsoft Asian Research Institute was very close to that of universities, with both a scientific research atmosphere and a technology transformation channel.

As a visiting professor at a university, he often lectured to students on weekends and also worked part-time as a doctoral supervisor. After joining Jingdong Digital, many students have come to the company for internship because of his training and recommendation, and interns can also promote the integration process of the team's production, education and research, and even some students will be regularized, he said that this is the process of building a talent system, which is helpful to the company and the society.

From Microsoft Asian Research Institute, to college teachers, to vice president of JD Digital, it seems to be a change of identity, but his direction is always the same. He once said in a speech that if he did not do urban calculations, he would not come to JD.com.

And his singleness is also "combined" with the company's singleness, he told deeptech: "The group attaches great importance to the field of smart cities, continuous investment, I personally have a persistent pursuit of this field, no matter how good other areas of the industry, our direction has never changed." Other people may be computer vision fire, a bunch of people run to do computer vision, nlp fire and run to do nlp, but we have been deeply rooted in the industry, never wavered. At the same time, it is also constantly learning and iterating rapidly in cooperation with the government. When one day, the most bitter and tiring things in the industry are solved, perhaps the best reward for Zheng Yu.

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