Sino Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation

1:Introduction

The Sino Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation(SSSTC) program is a governmental framework between China and Switzerland. It aims to encourage and strengthen individual contacts by building a multi-level research cooperation between institutions, research groups as well as individuals.

The goals for the action phase of SSSTC are to

• Strengthen the academic ties between Switzerland and China through research and academic collaborations.
  
• Increase the visibility of Swiss universities and research institutions in China through faculty and student exchange
  
• Encourage long term institutional cooperation between Swiss and Chinese education and research institutions.

2:Our Proposal for SSSTC

2.1 Area of proposed community
The area of focus of the proposed community is Big Data Research. The proposed community will include Swiss and Chinese Scholars from science,engineering,and management who are interested in Big Data Research topics
Given the expertise of the people on the project team and advisory board the work in this project will initially focus on:
a) Models, techniques, processes, and methods for collecting, storing, analysing, and utilizing Big Data
b) Impacts of Big Data availability and data analytics
c) Privacy,rights, and security in the era of Big Data
d) (Social)Network modelling and analysis in Big Data
2.2 Reasons for the proposed community
Over the past few years, we have seen an explosion of Big Data research and applications in a variety of domains across science, engineering, and management: genomics, data mining, and business intelligence, etc. Among others, Swiss universities become more and more interested in doing research and teaching in Big Data. They have advanced computing infrastructure and extensive experiences in data related research topics such as Data Mining and Machine Learning. Meanwhile, Swiss companies in various industries such as banking,EE commerce,and healthcare are demanding more skilful analysts who are familiar with techniques of Big Data collection, analysis, and applications.Both trends have created an urgent need to train students to become qualified data analysts. Whilst there are specific numbers for the demand of data savvy employees in Switzerland, we do have two important figures from which we may be able to extrapolate numbers for Switzerland. First, a study by the McKinsey Institute expects a need of 1.5 million data savvy managers in the US alone. Proportionally, we could extrapolate a demand of 40’000 such managers in Switzerland. In addition, a study by ICTswitzerland expects a shortage of 87’000 professionals in the ICT sector. A good part of them are going to do some sort of data analysis. Whilst these numbers might be inflated, they do predict a significant demand on big data capability in Switzerland.