Prof. James M. Tien, member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Engineering, gave a report entitled “Big Data: Unleashing Information" on September 18, 2014, during his visit to State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR), Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) at the invitation of Dr. FANG Shifeng.

attendees

Big Data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of available tools to undertake their acquisition, access, analytics and/or application in a reasonable amount of time.

In the U. S., major research programs are being funded to deal with big data in all five sectors of the economy, including services, manufacturing, construction, agriculture and mining, Prof. Tien said.

Tien put forward the data rich, information poor (DRIP) problems that have been pervasive since the advent of large-scale data collections or warehouses. The DRIP conundrum has been mitigated by the Big Data approach which has unleashed information.

New acquisition, access, analytics and application technologies are being developed to further Big Data as it is being employed to help resolve the 14 grand challenges identified by the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, he introduced.

Finally, Prof. Tien had discussions with attendees, including on data quality issues.

About 50 researchers and postgraduates attended the forum which is hosted by Prof. ZHOU Chenghu, member of CAS.

Dr. James M. Tien is a Distinguished Professor and the Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. In 2007, He held leadership positions at Bell Telephone Laboratories, at the Rand Corporation, and at Structured Decisions Corporation. In 2001 he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest honors accorded to an engineer. His research interests include systems modeling, public policy, decision analysis and information systems.