This year's May Day holiday, Beijing's tourism boom, the average daily passenger flow of the bus system as high as 5.11 million person-times, in order to cope with this challenge, Beijing Public Transport Group carefully deployed, especially in the Forbidden City, Shichahai and Badaling and other popular attractions on the 23 key routes, an additional 396 buses, however, behind this craze, a more critical question surfaced: how to provide a scientific maintenance program for the huge bus fleet, which is more like a headache math problem, At this time, there is a person who is trying to solve this problem.
Wang Xi, a young man with a gentle smile, has the key to solving these problems, and his team has developed an intelligent decision-making system that can not only process massive amounts of data, but also find the optimal solution path in the rapidly changing market environment.
Problem solving: Finding the "optimal solution" in a complex business world
Shanshu Technology is a technology company that can provide intelligent decision-making technology support for enterprises, when changing needs, a wide variety of raw materials, multiple production lines and a variety of channels are intertwined, every enterprise decision will become very complex. In Wang Xi's view, these complex enterprise problems are actually math problems, but this "big problem" is longer, more difficult, more variables and entangled with each other, in order to solve the problem and find the optimal solution, you need a "supercomputer" - Shanshu optimization solver.
How a company goes about production and inventory generally uses a solver. It is programmed to be solved in the form of a program. The code and data that are not easy to understand in front of you are the optimization solver, which is like a chip in a computer, which is the core tool of business decision-making. To put it simply, one of the core competitiveness of Shanshu Technology lies in the optimization ability of algorithms, which translates complex business problems into mathematical language, and can give optimal solutions in a short time with extremely high computing efficiency, which greatly saves operating costs.
The solver product iteration is now in its seventh version, and now it may face 10 types of problems, among which six of the ten types of mathematical problems are the world's first, and four are the world's second. And the first means a lot: the first means a lot of R&D investment; The first means that it takes three or five years to overtake in corners, and the object of overtaking is the accumulation of 30 or 50 years of European and American enterprises; The first also means a breakthrough that is largely autonomous and controllable.
Driven by the wave of digitalization, the transformation of Beijing's public transport is just a microcosm, and more and more enterprises are beginning to realize that digitalization is not only an upgrade, but also a change in business model.
Reminiscences: Use mathematical thinking to let students grow up when they were young
Wang Xi's life and career trajectory are looking for the "optimal solution", but his growth is not like this. He loved mathematics, and when he was admitted to the Department of Mathematics of Peking University with great expectations, he soon encountered unprecedented setbacks in his field of expertise. When he first entered university, Wang Xi thought that mathematics was a very basic subject, and he would definitely be able to learn it well if he worked hard. It turned out that the reality was not like this, I had learned the logic of knowledge before, and I just had to do a problem. But when I entered the field of mathematics, I found that I was going to do theoretical exploration, to prove those unknown things.
Wang Xi only scored seventy or eighty points in the first midterm math exam after entering the university, which undoubtedly dealt him a blow, but he did not collapse. At that time, Wang Xi thought that since he was a good student before, he should at least be a good student now, but what is the standard of a good student? In the past, he learned knowledge and scored high, which was largely the standard of a good student, but when he arrived at university, he found that diversifying his values was the top priority, and he began to reconcile with his own cognition.
After a short period of confusion, the unwillingness to admit defeat in his heart drove him to keep moving forward. In addition to his professional courses, he began to shuttle between the classes of the Department of History, the Department of Political Science, the School of Law and the School of Management, and in a year, he took more than a dozen courses and audited them, and he was exposed to the knowledge of humanities and social sciences from the perspective of mathematics, which also made him deeply feel the potential of mathematics to be widely used.
After graduating from Peking University, he seemed to be on the fast track. In 2008, Wang Xi went to Stanford to specialize in decision-making and risk analysis. During his Ph.D., he received an internship at the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, where he worked alongside the world's top teams. In 2013, Wang Xi served as the Senior Manager of Global Commercial Operations at Google's U.S. headquarters. Just when his career development was going well, Wang Xi unexpectedly received an invitation to return to China.
Think long-term: Make a decision about your future
After returning to China, he found that the domestic solver market had been monopolized by a few foreign companies for a long time. Therefore, creating an optimization solver with independent intellectual property rights is undoubtedly of great strategic value for China, which is a manufacturing power, a logistics power, and an industrial power, especially for China, which is in a high-quality economic development. It was also the gap in domestic solver research that allowed him and his team to see an opportunity.
Although the road to entrepreneurship is full of unknowns and challenges, it is also full of possibilities and opportunities. He analysed market trends and evaluated various possible options in light of potential opportunities and risks. In the end, he decided to return to China to start a business and give up the stability of the moment.
After that, Shanshu Technology gradually began to form a new generation of technology platform with a full chain of "difficult and correct" by virtue of its unique solver technology innovation ability and the spirit of insisting on doing "difficult but correct" things, which not only had "few opponents" in the market of intelligent production and operation systems of large enterprises, but also broke the technical blockade in the field of domestic solver software and fought a bloody way.
In 2021, Wang Xi was rated as an overseas high-level talent in Beijing and a distinguished expert in Beijing. In 2024, the industrial intelligent manufacturing decision-making optimization scheme promoted by Wang Xi and his team has been applied in more than 20 industry segments and hundreds of leading enterprises, covering the national economy and people's livelihood, creating hundreds of millions of economic benefits for enterprises.
As the co-founder of the company, Wang Xi needs to often go to the front line to investigate the needs of enterprises, and share the concept of data thinking with more enterprises in digital transformation services. Especially in today's upgrade from "Made in China" to "Made in China", digital technology plays a key role in it. Wang Xi believes that changing the mode of thinking is also an upgrade, even more important than a simple technical upgrade. To this end, he was also invited to share and communicate at academic lectures and industry conferences, and even joined the Internet science popularization army.
In just one year, Wang Xi's short video account has become a new position for digital science popularization. His content has attracted the attention of many people, including rigorous academic interpretations, vivid case studies, and even interesting life applications. It not only allows more people to understand the charm of digital technology, but also stimulates more people's interest and enthusiasm for digital technology.
Wang Xi is an entrepreneur who wants to change the world with data thinking. His story is not only a story of entrepreneurship, but also a story of a small self who constantly tries to optimize the environment around him, influence more people, and change the world with technology. At 22:15 today, please stay tuned to Beijing Satellite TV's "Cheer for You" to see how this young entrepreneur leads the future with data thinking in this digital era.