Alibaba Scientist Wins 'Frontiers of Science Award' at the International Basic Science Conference}

The 2025 International Basic Science Conference recently awarded the Frontiers of Science Award, honoring scientists who have made outstanding contributions to basic science over the past decade. Dr. Yin Wotao, a scientist from Alibaba, was among the recipients.

The conference, jointly organized by the Beijing Municipal Government, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the China Association for Science and Technology, and the World Chinese Mathematicians Union, attracted nearly a thousand experts and scholars from around the world this year. Notably, the event included four Fields Medalists, three Nobel laureates, and two Turing Award winners. The conference selected 118 outstanding papers across mathematics, physics, information science, and engineering, and awarded the Frontiers of Science Award. Four papers in the field of computational and applied mathematics were among the winners.

The awardees hailed from over 20 countries and regions, including top international scientists such as Fields Medalists and Wolf Prize winners. Yin Wotao and his supervisor Wang Yu and Zeng Jinshan received the award for their paper titled “Global Convergence of ADMM in Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization”. The review comments highlighted: “This work provides an in-depth analysis of the global convergence of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) in non-convex, non-smooth optimization problems, offering a solid theoretical foundation for its convergence. The authors made significant contributions to the analysis and convergence guarantees of algorithms, especially in complex and challenging scenarios.”

It is understood that Yin Wotao has long been engaged in decision intelligence research. He previously served as a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is now the head of the Decision Intelligence Laboratory at Alibaba DAMO Academy. Under his leadership, the team developed a comprehensive, world-class optimization solver called MindOpt over four years of independent research and development. This solver has won consecutive championships in two special competitions organized by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s Industry Development Promotion Center and has been successfully included as a typical application case in the Ministry’s “Artificial Intelligence Empowering New Industrialization” initiative.