SRIBD News

On April 19, the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data (SRIBD) marked its 10th anniversary. What began a decade ago, it was little more than a project idea born on a university campus, with only a handful of team members.

Over the past ten years it has grown into a dynamic force of 200 research and engineering professionals, firmly establishing a foothold in multiple strategic core industrial sectors.

Over the past decade, this new-type R&D institution has adhered to a core philosophy: “Mathematics as the foundation, data as the driver, and major applications as the orientation.”It has forged a distinct path from fundamental theory to hard-tech industrialization—a true journey of breaking through technological barriers.

A Decade of Sharpening the Sword: From 0 to 1, From 1 to N

Since its establishment in 2016, SRIBD has leveraged the academic heritage of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), has built a solid technological moat in core areas such as network communications, artificial intelligence, operations research and optimization, and scientific computing. Through a decade of focused cultivation SRIBD has gathered world-class scientists and achieved a series of breakthroughs in low-level operator optimization, domestic computing power adaptation, clinical deployment of medical large models, and legal technology empowerment. It has formed a capability landscape spanning from fundamental theoretical innovation to key technological breakthroughs and application implementation. On this basis, the Institute has also successfully incubated a number of prominent tech enterprises, such as Zhizi Xinyuan, which address critical "bottleneck" challenges, exploring an innovative path of deep integration between research and industry.

From its inception, SRIBD has carried a strong "Shenzhen gene"—confronting real industrial problems head-on and solving genuine frontline challenges. Academician Luo Zhiquan, Director of the Institute, emphasized that research should not be confined to the "ivory tower"; rather, scientific outcomes must take root in the social soil. Over the ten years, SRIBD has left a profound practical imprint across communications, AI, healthcare, judicial affairs, transportation, energy, and logistics.

Taking Root: Bridging the "Last Mile"

The robustness of technology is ultimately tested by the market.

HuatuoGPT, jointly developed by SRIBD and CUHK-Shenzhen has not remained on evaluation leaderboards—it has entered real clinical frontline settings. Today, HuatuoGPT has been deployed at scale across 14 public hospitals and 183 community health centers in and around Shenzhen, serving a population of nearly 5 million, with over 800,000 cumulative users and more than 2 million patient-provider interactions. It functions both as an "intelligent triage assistant" and as a tool to help physicians generate electronic medical records, gradually becoming a capable aid in alleviating the strain on primary healthcare resources.

On the government service frontline, AI solutions developed by SRIBD have been deployed in scenarios such as Shenzhen's 12345 hotline, with its evaluation standards incorporated into municipal-level AI platforms, advancing the intelligence of government services. In the legal domain, leveraging a key ministry-level laboratory of the Ministry of Justice—the only ministerial research platform in Shenzhen's political and legal field—SRIBD has led the National Key R&D Program project on "Full-Process Supervision of Administrative Law Enforcement" and has consecutively produced quantitative analysis reports on the construction of a law-based city for Shenzhen for four years, channeling the power of data science into the capillaries of social governance.

To address the "last mile" pain point in AI—the adaptation between algorithms and hardware—Zhizi Xinyuan, an incubated company, has developed efficient tools that successfully reduce the deployment time of large models on domestic chips from several days to just 38 minutes, with inference speed improved by up to 139 times, effectively unblocking the connectivity bottlenecks of heterogeneous computing. This means that AI applications running on domestic computing power now have a faster, lighter on-ramp.

Solving for the Future: From Network Optimization to Industrial Control

SRIBD's industrialization journey began with communications network optimization. Its proprietary SRCON technology has evolved from "world-first" to "large-scale application."

Over the decade, the Institute's technological reach has extended into broader industrial domains. In scientific computing, the team developed the "Xianpeng Solver," breaking international monopolies, and also created a high-performance, independently controllable fluid dynamics solver, using distributed clusters and parallel computing power to accelerate industry-specific solvers for scenarios such as cloud computing and pharmaceutical logistics. In industrial control, the Institute has built an industrial AI programming platform that enables AI to understand control logic and automatically generate deployable PLC programs. AI's role is being upgraded from a "code-generation tool" to an "industrial-control-engineering generation tool."

Standing at the ten-year milestone, Prof. Zhi-Quan Luo summarized the Institute's future direction as: uphold integrity and innovation, and forge ahead with determination.

Looking toward the next decade, the Institute will focus on three core capabilities—building data barriers, designing mathematical modeling algorithms, and enabling low-cost domestic AI deployment. Benchmarking against global leaders, it will deepen independent innovation.

From a single concept to leaving its mark across multiple industry landscapes, the Shenzhen Institute of Big Data has spent ten years accomplishing one thing: transforming problem-solving capabilities into industrial value, and turning technological breakthroughs into productive forces. The road ahead is still long, but the Institute's direction is clear—to contribute even more penetrating solutions to national strategy and Shenzhen's scientific and technological innovation.