Alibaba Cloud Releases Alink Machine Learning Platform on GitHub
Alibaba Cloud (Alibaba) has released the source code its Alink machine learning platform on GitHub. Developed by Alibaba, Alink offers a broad range of algorithm libraries that support both batch and stream processing, vital for machine learning tasks such as online product recommendation and intelligent customer services.
Open source
According to Alibaba, Alink was developed based on Flink, a unified distributed computing engine. With seamless unification of batch and stream processing, Alibaba says Alink offers a more effective platform for developers to perform data analytics and machine learning tasks.
The platform supports open-source data storage such as Kafka, HDFS and HBase, as well as Alibaba’s proprietary data storage format. Unsurprisingly, Alink is already used to power various businesses within Alibaba. For instance, it has been credited with helping increase the CTR of product recommendations by 4 percent on the Tmall e-commerce platform during Alibaba’s Global Shopping Festival this year.
Data analysts and software developers can access the platform and use it for their software applications to incorporate capabilities such as statistics analysis, machine learning, real-time prediction, personalized recommendation or abnormality detection.
“As a platform that consists of various algorithms combining learning in various data processing patterns, Alink can be a valuable option for developers looking for robust big data and advanced machine learning tools,” said Yangqing Jia, the president and senior fellow of Data Platform at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“As one of the top ten contributors to GitHub, we are committed to connecting with the open source community as early as possible in our software development cycles. Sharing Alink on GitHub underlines our such long-held commitment,” he said.
Like a growing number of Chinese companies, Alibaba is an avid contributor to open source. As a top ten organization on GitHub, it has a large open source projects under its belt that includes AliSQL, RocketMQ, ApsaraCache, Pouch, Atlas and AliOS Things, among others.
