OnNovember 20, Zhejiang University and Alibaba Cloud unveiled the fruits of“SmartCloud Laboratory” at the Digital and Intelligent Education Summit. Aseries of innovative platforms designed by the lab, such as “research@ZJU”,“learning@ZJU”, “SmartCloud Classrooms” and “ZJU DingTalk”, have realized“cloud” teaching, research, administration and life at ZhejiangUniversity.

In2018, Zhejiang University and Alibaba Cloud co-established “SmartCloudLaboratory”. In the past two years, a fully digitalized “virtual university”has been taking shape thanks to the power of information in education.

Interms of teaching, Zhejiang University has completed the intelligent renovationof 400 classrooms which can support the live streaming of 900 courses on adaily basis. Students are also able to enroll in any course anytime andanywhere via ZJU DingTalk.

Withthe application of new AI technology, online classrooms can support real-timeand accurate multi-lingual subtitling and simultaneous interpreting, thusproviding an easily accessible classroom experience for Zhejiang Universitystudents from 108 countries and regions. Even in the unstable situation of thepandemic, overseas students could not only “keep learning” but also “studybetter”.

Thereare over 80 applications on ZJU DingTalk which has more than 250,000 activeusers every day. On ZJU DingTalk, users can get down to their to-do list, suchas registration and oral defense, and they can even know about the crowdednessof each canteen. “Learning@ZJU” is one of the most commonly used platforms andit has incorporated the whole process of teaching and evaluation.

Researchinnovation is the core competitiveness of universities. In the past,universities would scatter their servers according to disciplines and allocatedthem to project teams, which would impose limitations on research efficiency.the University has pioneered the “crowdsourcing” of dispersed computingresources on campus, and has established a unified resource pool through afiber optic connection to the public cloud computing power of Alibaba Cloud,thereby achieving unified management, service and operation.

Atpresent, Zhejiang University has 147 research projects on the research cloud.Flexible allocation, on-demand use and no scheduling have reduced the timespent on Maxquant protein spectrometry analysis to 2 minutes and improved theperformance of the 3D reconstruction of cultural relics by 70 times. Access tothe public cloud of Alibaba Cloud has also diminished costs tremendously.During the outbreak of COVID-19, the scale of cloud resources used by ZhejiangUniversity is 1.2 times as large as that of the specialized cloud constructionin 2018, but the cost is merely 1/25 as high.

“SmartCloudLaboratory” will provide a wider diversity of research software and establish aresearch cyberspace to promote inter-disciplinary, cross-institutional andcross-regional research collaboration in the future.

Onthe same day, Zhejiang University, Alibaba Cloud, 11 other universities and 12other enterprises announced the establishment of “SmartCloud Scientific andEducational Alliance” in an effort to promote the digitalization ofuniversities, accelerate research innovation, facilitate  teaching andlearning anytime and anywhere, and propel lifelong education.