Sino Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation

3:Goals and Activites
Therefore, the proposed community aims to bring together both Chinese and Swiss scholars and practitioners to create the synergy in terms of research collaboration, educating students, and academic exchange, leading to the advance of basic scientific knowledge in Big Data research. It will also connect students, researchers, and teachers from a variety of disciplines, in particular from computer science, social science, economics, and business administration. In addition, it aims to educate Swiss students in these topics and prepare them for their careers in industry and in academia through academic exchange or company internships. Last but not least, it will enable a variety of interdisciplinary research collaborations among Swiss and Chinese scholars.

Thus, a multitude of questions will be studied, related to data mining, social computing,e-commerce, etc. To reach its goals, the community will enable synergy between the Swiss and the Chinese participants in three particular areas: 1) research, 2) education, and 3) community outreach.

3.1 Research Activities

The Big Data area is full of exciting research questions. Since real-world challenges in this space can rarely be solved with simple, one-dimensional solutions, many of those questions require an interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary research approach. This includes theoretical modeling and data analysis, economic and computational design, computer simulations, lab experiments, prototype development, and empirical evaluation. To provide a flavor of the type of research the proposed community may be studying, we now describe several particular Big Data related research questions we are looking into in areas ranging from E-commerce to Environmental science.

3.2 Education Activities
For education purses, the community will fund short-term (6-12 months) academic exchanges for Swiss and Chinese scholars/postdocs and PhD students. The involved Swiss and Chinese Universities are equipped with advanced facilities for teaching and research, including libraries, labs, and computer and information centers. The primary education of students will be done via the individual departments (computer science, biology, marketing etc.). To complement the students’ regular research work, the research community will offer seminars and workshops on big data research. In addition to the activities offered by professors at the hosting institutions, we will invite international scholars from various disciplines (economics, computer science, business, etc.) to give short (e.g., 1-day) or longer (e.g., 1-week) seminars or workshops on Big Data research topics in major Swiss universities.

3.3 Outreach Activities

• Inviting world-renowned scholars to a regular seminar series.
• Organizing an annual workshop to establish an interdisciplinary community of researchers in Big Data Research.
• If possible, we will also co-organize such events with the institutions like Chinese Academy of Science, Swiss National Science Foundation, IEEE, ACM, or AIS.
• We also plan on reaching out to a number of companies in industry to find real-world problems that involve research and application challenges in Big Data.