Research-innovation Community (RiC) on Big Data Research in Science, Engineering, and Management (SEM)

The main focus area of our program:

The main focus area of our program lies in Big Data Research. The big data research program 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

The motivation of our program:
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.
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