Academicians from across the Straits shared their insights on the developments and impact of the increasingly important field of big data at the “Big Data Forum: Development, Analysis and Utilization” organised by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) on 13 October.

 

The forum was one of the highlights of the University’s 30th anniversary celebrations.

 

Advances in multimedia, social media and the Internet of Things (IoT) will induce further growth in data for the foreseeable future. As leading scholars in their respective fields, the academicians discussed the importance of harnessing the power of big data and the implications for society. They were: 

 

? Professor Way Kuo, CityU President, Member of US National Academy of Engineering and Academia Sinica, and Foreign Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Russian Academy of Engineering

 

? Professor Pan Yunhe, Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering

 

? Professor Kung Hsiang-tsung, Member of US National Academy of Engineering and Academia Sinica

 

? Professor Li Deren, Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering and Chinese Academy of Sciences

 

? Professor Yang Qiang, Head of Huawei Noah’s Ark Laboratory and Professor of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

 

? Professor Tu King-ning, Fellow of the Metallurgical Society and Member of Academia Sinica

 

“CityU is rapidly developing know-how in various areas related to big data, especially in the area of public health,” said Professor Kuo in his opening remarks. “Our research into public health includes such areas as plasma ion implantation in the biomedical field.”

 

“We are developing expertise in genomics, bioinformatics, and omics science in general. Genomics will have an enormously powerful predictive power for human health in the future,” he added.

 

CityU’s researchers are also exploring the development of new analytical methods for quality control of pharmaceutical companies, drug screening and environmental toxicity testing, according to Professor Kuo. “All these areas need knowledge of and skills in big data,” he said.

 

In his presentation, Professor Kuo used the examples of the safety of nuclear energy and the effectiveness of teaching to illustrate the data points needed for drawing inference when making decision.

 

Professor Pan said big data would become the “power” behind economic development in the 21st century, just like petroleum was in the 20th century.

         

Professor Kung Hsiang-tsung elaborated his views regarding the use of Internet of Things, getting massive data for data analytics, and detecting contextual information to enhance big data analytics.

 

Professor Li, Professor Yang and Professor Tu discussed the implications of big data for the smart city concept, user-modelling in social media, and statistical analysis of reliability data in very-large-scale-integration technology, respectively.