SK Planet shows core techs for e-commerce

SK Planet CTO Lee Sang-ho delivers a speech during Tech Planet 2016 at COEX in southern Seoul, Monday. / Courtesy of SK Planet

By Park Jae-hyuk

SK Planet strives to introduce a futuristic system making online shopping easier and more convenient, its CTO Lee Sang-ho said at an annual conference, Monday.

The nation’s leading mobile platform provider hosted the fifth edition of the company’s retail and IT conference, Tech Planet 2016, at COEX in southern Seoul, under the theme of “Commerce Everywhere.”

“It is time to talk about zero-effort commerce, which hardly requires users’ efforts while enabling them to purchase items more comfortably,” Lee said in an opening keynote speech.

Lee said his company has mulled over several ways to follow the trend and decided to focus on the three core technologies of searching, recommendation and an advanced chat bot system capable of conversing with customers.

The company’s online open market platform, 11st, has enhanced search accuracy to meet customers’ exact demands and has personalized displays for each customer in line with their interests, he said.

“We are preparing for an image-based search function to help customers find similar-style items,” Lee said. “As more customers hope for a search engine that understands their intentions, 11st began to offer a digital concierge service which realizes conversational commerce with our chat bot.”

Alibaba Group principal engineer Rong Jin and IBM Watson fellow both delivered keynote addresses.

Jin introduced large-scale matching algorithms which have been widely applied in e-commerce but not been studied extensively yet. He introduced the optimization theory and two-sided matching theory as well as the theoretical framework of Alibaba’s e-commerce platform.

Roukos talked about cognitive computing and how the multilingual Watson uses machine learning to understand natural languages.

The CTO for translation technologies at IBM said Watson can analyze intentions and emotions of writers, classifying each word included in a single text. According to Roukos, the system is learning various languages, including Korean, to communicate with users in natural languages.

At the global conference, 21 experts delivered speeches and 12 startups set up booths to promote the latest trends in retail industries, such as online-to-offline platforms, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and fintech.