PARIS – Alibaba Group, a leading e-commerce and technology company, and worldwide partner of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), recently premiered a short film entitled “To the Greatness of HER”. The 8-minute video is dedicated to the evolution of gender equality since the 19th century. Leveraging Alibaba’s Cloud-based Artificial Intelligence, vintage photographs of female athletes’ achievements from past Olympic Games were colorized and restored in the short film and exhibited at the Alibaba Evening in Paris in line with the Olympic Games Paris 2024.
Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, said, “To the Greatness of HER highlights the great progress of women in sports through the course of history. My heartfelt thanks go to our friends at Alibaba for using AI-powered technology to let the achievements of these women in sports shine through the full spectrum of colors.
More importantly, the film allows us to reflect on one of the most important priorities of the Olympic community – empowering women in and through sports.”
“Gender equality is a team sport. We all have a role to play and we all have to lead by example. With this film, Alibaba is leading by example and using its technological expertise to highlight this important topic,” added Bach.
Premiered at the Alibaba Evening, the short film employs cloud-based AI technologies to restore old photos from historical archives through critical steps including clarity processing to enhance image resolution and colorizing grayscale images with vibrant colors using advanced AI models.
“Alibaba is proud to collaborate closely with the IOC to champion inclusivity and equity, core values that Alibaba firmly upholds,” Chris Tung, President of Alibaba Group, Strategic Development. “By using cloud-based AI to deepen our understanding of the past and shine a light on the achievements of female athletes, this project is a great example to showcase how technology can be utilized to promote the values we cherish.”
As a global technology pioneer, Alibaba Group is committed to fostering a culture that values diversity, equity, and inclusion for employees to grow, create value and get support and care. At Alibaba, women account for 47.2% of its total employees. Women’s innovation and leadership are playing an increasingly important role in company development, with 41.4% of management and 30% of the board of directors of the Group are female.
Partnership with IOC to Revitalize Historic Moments of Paris 1924 through Cloud- based AI
\libaba Cloud is also partnering with the IOC to harness its cloud-based AI for transforming sports archiving by revitalizing historical moments from Paris 1924. Through Alibaba Cloud’s deep learning models, the selected Olympic archive footage from Paris 1924 have been restored and colorized, breathing new life into these historical moments and allowing audiences to fully experience and relive Olympic history through AI innovation.
To revive the dynamic Olympic moments from a century past, Alibaba Cloud leveraged its self-proprietary imperfection detection and correction technology for greyscale films and a sophisticated video restoration model to eradicate video imperfections, reduce noise, and enhance resolution. It also applied its cutting-edge video colorization models to ensure precise color fidelity and to seamlessly extend the colorization from select keyframes across the entire footage, achieving consistency and vibrancy throughout the video segments.
Since Alibaba Group’s worldwide partnership with the IOC started in 2017, its Cloud division has been supporting digitalization of the Olympics with its proven cloud technologies. Alibaba Cloud is committed to help transforming the experience of the Olympic Games further by not only making Paris 2024 even more efficient and engaging, but also promoting inclusivity through creating more meaningful and memorable experience for everyone involved.
