quantum and chip technology."

Alibaba DAMO Academy has over 300 researchers worldwide since its launch, focusing on five major areas including machine intelligence, robotics, fintech, data computing and quantum computing. Global partners of the Academy include renowned academic institutes such as University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University and The Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In the past year, the Academy released Taizhang, a quantum-circuit simulator leveraging Alibaba's powerful classical computing infrastructure, which has successfully simulated a significantly more complicated family of quantum circuits than previously achieved. The milestone was an important step in the field and has raised new discussions around the boundaries of where a quantum-computing device may be considered exceeding the capacity of all classical computers. An extended version ofTaizhang will soon be released as a tool for both hardware and application development.

The Academy also programmed an ultra-low latency and high performance DLP (deep learning processor) on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), as an effort to balance the low latency and high performance requirements for tasks such as image recognition and analysis.

Alibaba also announced "Alibaba Global Mathematics Competition", a global math competition to discover and nurture next-generation math geniuses and raise awareness about the importance of this critical subject. Leading mathematicians, including Yurii Nesterov, Professor at Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium; Frank Kelly, Professor at University of Cambridge; Gang Tian, Distinguished Professor at Peking University; Jianshu Li, Chair Professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; and Yitang Zhang, Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara