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People's Daily: Technology driven transformation and upgrading of smart media

The dual core of content and technology continues to promote the intelligent development of the news media industry. Alibaba Cloud enables the whole process of intelligent production of media through AI technology. The "AI Intelligent Editorial Department of People's Daily" created by People's Daily and Alibaba Cloud has played an important role in the coverage of the two sessions in 2020. It will be upgraded again on the eve of the two sessions in 2021, comprehensively improving the ability to "see", "understand" and "review".

Customer introduction

The People's Daily is a public institution directly under the CPC Central Committee and a news agency of the CPC Central Committee. It has 23 internal institutions, 1 public institution (new media center), 72 local offices (31 branches in all provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, branches in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Macao Special Administrative Region, and 39 branches abroad), In 1992, it was rated as one of the top ten newspapers in the world by UNESCO. Its news information collection channels are all over the world and distributed in more than 100 countries and regions.

People's Daily is accelerating media integration and digital transformation. From the establishment of a new media center to the creation of a media integrated news "central kitchen", the technology platform covers the whole process of news production, such as news clue collection, material processing, and effect evaluation. It has changed from a newspaper to a "people's media matrix" in the form of all media.

In 2016, the People's Daily reached a cooperation with Alibaba Cloud to build a new front for media communication by using the Internet and cloud computing technology to target massive users around the world. In the 2020 Social Responsibility Report, the People's Daily put forward that "adhering to content as the king, focusing on mobile first, increasing technology research and development, and striving to create a new mainstream media with strong influence and competitiveness", which is the proposition of technology and content integration, and also the basic principle of its new mainstream media construction.

Business challenges

Technological innovation has provided massive computing power for the transformation of traditional media to new media. With 110 million downloads, the People's Daily client has become a mainstream news portal on the mobile Internet through visual, readable and audible all media content. The relevant technical director of the People's Daily client said that he expected to adopt secure, reliable, flexible and elastic cloud computing technology to embrace the Internet, so that where there is news, there will be People's Daily, and where there are users, there will be People's Daily. It is inevitable for the People's Daily client to go to the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud solutions
Clients are fully on cloud

The overall cloud launch of the People's Daily client has mainly done four things: first, the architecture design, which uses cloud computing capabilities such as horizontal expansion and elastic scaling to better meet the needs of rapid user growth; Second, Alibaba Cloud CDN, wireless accelerated CAS (Central Authentication Service), video cloud, mobile data analysis and other technologies are used to provide guarantee for People's Daily from product performance, customer experience, security and other aspects; Third, use Alibaba Cloud big data platform to build a mobile data platform for data analysis and improve data processing capability; Fourth, based on Alibaba Cloud's professional O&M capabilities, clients can obtain more reliable business continuity assurance. Industry experts believe that the exploration of the People's Daily's client on the cloud and running safely and smoothly for two years has made a substantial demonstration for many traditional media, which will promote more traditional media to try advanced means to achieve mobile innovation.

AI Editorial Department

In 2019, the People's Daily Smart Media Research Institute and the State Key Laboratory of Communication Content Cognition were established one after another, taking AI technology as the research core, and transforming to intelligent media business. The People's Daily has constructed a transformation path of "from technology enabled content, to content led value orientation, and finally to external empowerment", realizing the transformation from mainstream media to "new mainstream media".

In this context, it is an inevitable choice to enable the whole process of news production with intelligent technology. Alibaba Cloud Video Cloud AI Editorial Department provides the People's Daily with AI technology to enable the whole process of intelligent production of media, which can not only localize the delivery of end-to-end products, but also support hierarchical decoupling and cooperation with other business processes.

The "AI Intelligent Editorial Department of People's Daily" created by People's Daily and Alibaba Cloud will play an important role in the coverage of the two sessions in 2020. On the eve of the two sessions in 2021, the editorial department will be upgraded again. With the help of big data and AI technology, the whole system efficiently processes massive videos, pictures, and texts in line with the standards of news business, realizes the automatic, batch, and intelligent production of videos, pictures, and texts for the set theme, enriches the types of contributions at the media user end, and faster and better supports the core business of People's Daily.

Business Value

The upgraded "AI Intelligent Editorial Department of People's Daily" has added multiple functions, focusing on improving the ability to "see", "understand" and "review". "Look" refers to the ability to process materials such as intensive editing, smart posters, and one click close-up; "Awareness" refers to the search and recognition ability of multimodal retrieval; "Audit" refers to the intelligent audit capability of content.

  • Cloud intensive editing, smart posters, one button close-up, efficient processing of materials

The cloud refined editing function aims at the situation that after intelligent processing of video materials, fine editing, color mixing, special effects and other refined editing and production are required. It integrates mainstream editing tools and mobilizes cloud resources to achieve faster computing, larger storage and more flexible scheduling than local. At the news scene, reporter editors can achieve smooth editing under the support of remote high computing power by simply linking to the non editorial high-performance server on the cloud with one key, and editing can be completed in a short time even with 4K image quality. At the peak of business volume, hundreds of intensive editing workstations can be flexibly created at the same time, greatly improving the efficiency of news production and video production. Smart poster function, that is, with the help of AI ability, to quickly generate pictures. For the scenes of the two sessions, the People's Daily has reserved poster templates covering a large number of topics, such as current political reports, party building propaganda, poverty alleviation, and epidemic resistance. According to the editing needs, you can quickly retrieve templates, replace pictures, and generate and release posters of various themes. In addition, intelligent posters can also realize automatic matting, automatic typesetting, color matching, style setting and other functions based on AI algorithm, quickly realize batch production, and greatly improve the design and production efficiency. The one button close-up function is to quickly cut the video material of multiple people at 16:9 in meetings and activities according to a single person, intelligently generate a single person's vertical screen video, while maintaining the integrity of key information. Realize the focus of video content, meet the audience's viewing needs for important people and important content, and adapt to the mobile viewing habits.

  • Multi mode search, accurate search

In order to facilitate editors to find full media materials more accurately and quickly, multimodal search functions rely on face recognition, object recognition, voice recognition, natural language processing OCR recognition, as well as the underlying algorithm capability of video DNA, use AI's stronger "savvy" to strengthen semantic understanding and summary of news materials, provide users with intelligent text search, image search, video search, multilingual search, semantic search and other scenarios, and comprehensively improve the production efficiency of editing journalists' news.

  • Intelligent audit and strict control

The People's Daily, as the organ newspaper of the Party Central Committee, needs to ensure the safety and accuracy of the published content. Relying on big data platform and mature AI algorithm, the intelligent audit function can accurately identify various elements and scenes in videos and pictures, and provide reference for subsequent manual audit, significantly reduce the cost and time of manual audit, and effectively avoid audit omissions. Integrating Alibaba Cloud's technologies in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data, the upgrade of the "AI Intelligent Editorial Department of People's Daily" conforms to the trend of mobile, video, and intelligent development of major reports, increases the application scenarios of AI enabled newspaper full media production, and further improves news productivity.