“Big Data Perspectives” Workshop

Renmin University of China, Beijing

July 8, 2013

 

Theme

“Big Data” is a hot term these days and is promising to have profound impacts on the future advances of computer science and IT industry. However, it is also a term with very broad and diverse meanings. When people in different fields are talking about big data, they are usually talking about different aspects of this vague concept. For instance,

·         Systems people are mainly motivated by building efficient systems to process data with unprecedented scale, sometimes in real time.

·         Database people are exploring new models and techniques to manage the “new big data”, which is fundamentally different from the traditional SQL systems.

·         Data mining people are thinking about the possibility of discovering the patterns of various human behaviors and predicting the future ultimately.

·         Information retrieval people are consistently pushing the boundary to organize and retrieve the information of the world, largely beyond the traditional static documents.

·         Machine learning people is being thrilled by a paradigm shift from algorithm-centric to data-centric, as the recent deep learning wave demonstrated.

It is no doubt that all of the above viewpoints are valuable and carry deep insights from people with different experiences. The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers from multiple fields (database, data mining, machine learning, information retrieval, systems, statistics, etc.) together to share their perspectives on big data. We are not targeting to draw a unified and coherent picture of this concept. Instead, we want to provide a forum to let people to share their thoughts and hear voices from people in other fields. We believe this kind of exchange of perspectives can broaden our views of big data, inspire new ideas, and facilitate cross-discipline collaborations.

 

Program

 

9:00am-9:30am: Opening speech, Prof. Xiaoyong Du, Prof. Xiaofang Zhou, and Prof. Ji-Rong Wen (Renmin University of China)

 

Keynote Speech

9:30am-10:30am: “Big Data and Lifelong Machine Learning”, Prof. Qiang Yang (Huawei Noah Ark Research Lab)

 

Morning Session

10:30am-11:00am: “Real Issues in Big Data”, Prof. Charles Ling (University of Western Ontario)

11:00am-11:30am: “Big Data: Science or gimmick”, Dr. Xueqi Cheng (ICT, CAS)

11:30am-12:00pm: "Deep learning - A new wave of machine learning for big data ", Dr. Kai Yu (Baidu Inc.)

12:00pm-1:30pm: Lunch Break

 

Afternoon Session

1:30pm-2:00pm: “Sensing the Dynamics of the Web”, Prof. Ji-Rong Wen (Renmin University of China)

2:00pm-2:30pm: “Relevance in big data: an IR perspective”, Prof. Jian-Yun Nie (University of Montreal)

2:30pm-3:00pm: “Web-Scale Entity Mining and Crowdsourcing”, Dr. Zaiqing Nie (Microsoft Research Asia)

3:00pm-3:30pm: “Big Data and Big Data Technologies: A Database Perspective”, Prof. Ling Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology)

3:30pm-4:00pm: Tea Break

 

Panel

4:00pm-5:30pm: “How to do big data research in academia”, All speakers                                                                          

6:00pm-8:00pm: Dinner

 

Venue

中国人民大学逸夫第一报告厅