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U S T . H K
he “Big Data” age is well and truly upon us. Huge sets of
information are being accumulated through sensor networks,
scientific measurements, financial transactions, medical images,
web interactions, and social media, among others. Indeed, 2016
is the year in which global internet traffic is expected to surpass
one zettabyte – the equivalent of a trillion gigabytes – and keep on
rising.
*
We now need to know how to mine and analyze what all
this information can tell us about the world. It is a development
being boldly embraced by the HKUST Big Data Institute.
With data science a targeted area of research excellence at
the University, the recently established Institute is set to leverage
the leading reputation of HKUST academics to forge an inter-
disciplinary platform that serves as a springboard for new fields
of enquiry and technologies in computer science and beyond.
Indeed, the opportunities that big data offers in addressingmajor
global challenges and advancing discipline-specific understand-
ing are huge. The financial world, city living, and e-commerce
are just some of the many sectors that stand to benefit.
HKUST faculty’s expertise covers core techniques and tech-
nologies to extract, integrate, manage, analyze, visualize, and
discover knowledge from large and heterogeneous data sets. Re-
search initiatives range from the use of “deep learning” (building
and training neural networks) and “transfer learning” (ability
to recognize and apply knowledge learned in previous tasks to
novel tasks) to produce biological and health knowledge to the
development of algorithms for computer vision applications.
External research partnerships include an agreement with
China’s largest integrated IT service provider Digital China Hold-
ings Ltd to explore
smart city service
provision and the
application of big
data information
technologies. The
WeChat-HKUST
Joint Lab on Arti-
ficial Intelligence
Technology also
provides HKUST
researchers access to data generated by 650 million active
users for studying artificial intelligence – in particular in areas of
natural language processing including speech recognition.
Big data has tremendous potential to open up studies and
applications that would otherwise not be possible. Supported
by internationally renowned research teams across the Schools of
Science, Engineering, Busi-
ness and Humanities and
Social Science, and east-west
vision and networks, the
HKUST Big Data Institute is
well positioned to lead and
contribute to this exciting
development, both to aca-
demia and society. Finding
out how the future will be
reshaped by those zettabytes
of data begins here…
Top left: Prof Qiang
Yang discussing with
his research students.
Top right: HKUST
signed a Framework
Agreement with
Digital China to build
Smart City Research
Institute, September
2015.
Bottom: Plaque
unveiling ceremony
for the WeChat-HKUST
Joint Laboratory on
Artificial Intelligence
Technology,
November 2015.
* Cisco® Visual Networking Index
(VNI), The Zettabyte Era: Trends
and Analysis
The big data world is swimming
in information. However,
such data will remain just
data without ways to extract,
integrate, store, compact,
retrieve, analyze, and predict
from it
PROF QIANG YANG
New Bright Professor of Engineering,
Head, Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, and Director, HKUST Big Data
Inaugural Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions
on Big Data
Engineering, and Directo , HKUST Big Data Institute,
