Alibaba has said it will invest $15bn in research and development over the next three years, with plans to open research labs in China and overseas to focus on artificial intelligence and security technologies.

阿里巴巴(Alibaba)表示，将在未来3年投资150亿美元用于研发，计划在中国和海外开设研究实验室，关注人工智能和安全技术。

Alibaba said on Wednesday it will open a total of eight research labs in China, the US, Russia, Israel and Singapore to focus on areas such as machine learning and natural language processing.

阿里巴巴周三表示，“达摩院”已经开始在全球各地组建前沿科技研究中心，包括亚洲达摩院、美洲达摩院、欧洲达摩院，并在北京、杭州、新加坡、以色列、圣马特奥、贝尔维尤、莫斯科等地设立不同研究方向的实验室，关注机器学习和自然语言处理等领域。

The Chinese ecommerce company called its latest R&D push the Alibaba DAMO Academy, which it said was designed to enhance worldwide technological collaboration and narrow the technology gap.

这家中国电商集团这一最新研发努力名为阿里巴巴达摩院(Alibaba DAMO Academy)，阿里巴巴表示其目的是加强全球技术合作并缩短技术差距。

Like its peers, Alibaba has been beefing up its artificial technology and machine learning capabilities to process the troves of data it collects daily from consumers.

与同业一样，阿里巴巴一直在提高其人工智能技术和机器学习能力，以处理每日收集的来自消费者的大量数据。

The unit, which will be headed by Alibaba Group’s chief technology officer, Jeff Zhang, plans to hire 100 research staff.

达摩院将由阿里巴巴集团首席技术官张建锋(Jeff Zhang)率领，计划聘请100名研究人员。

Alibaba said it currently employs about 25,000 engineers and scientists.

阿里巴巴表示，目前该集团拥有大约2.5万名工程师和科学家。