Alibaba celebrates gender equality with short film leveraging cloud-based AI

Alibaba Group, a worldwide partner of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), is celebrating gender equality with a short film entitled “To the greatness of her”.  

The eight-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 colourised and restored to be featured in the short film and exhibited ahead of the Olympic Games Paris 2024. 

The campaign also rode on the IOC's commitment to gender equality, which has significantly increased female athlete participations; from 2.2% in Paris 1900, when women athletes first competed for the modern Olympics, to  50% at the current Olympic Games Paris 2024 – as the IOC has distributed quotas evenly between female and male athletes for the first time.  

To commemorate this milestone, Alibaba created a short film entitled: "To the greatness of her," featuring three prominent female athletes – Zhang Shan from China, Kathrine Switzer from the US, and Suzanne Lenglen from France. 

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. 

“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 utilised to promote the values we cherish.”  

Alibaba Cloud is also partnering with the IOC to harness its cloud-based AI for transforming sports archiving by revitalising historical moments from Paris 1924.

Through Alibaba Cloud's deep learning models, the selected Olympic archive footage from Paris 1924 have been restored and colourised, 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 colorisation models to ensure precise color fidelity and to seamlessly extend the colourisation from select keyframes across the entire footage, achieving consistency and vibrancy throughout the video segments.

MARKETING-INTERACTIVE has reached out to Alibaba for more information. 

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