Hangzhou photos

Below are some photos from Hangzhou (click for larger versions). Earlier in the week we had more meetings at Alibaba concerning the establishment of a social science data observatory sponsored by Alibaba Cloud Computing, making use of data from Taobao, Alipay, Alibaba.com, etc. Related post.

See here for an Economist special report on the Big Data deluge. Imagine you could observe 100+ million users transacting on a platform with 400 million item listings -- Taobao volume equals about 2 percent of all Chinese retail sales, and growing fast :-)

Yesterday we gave a presentation to about 200 technical staff who were attending a company-wide retreat at a resort outside Hangzhou.

Today I have to turn my physics brain back on as I am giving a talk at Zhejiang University (Zheda). Until now I have been simulating a social / computational scientist :-)