York University had a strong presence at the first Big Data and Information Analytics conference held at the Xian Jiaotong University in China this past October. The event was organized by mathematics Professor Jianhong Wu from the Faculty of Science, computer science Professor Nick Cercone from the Lassonde School of Engineering and Professor Xu Zenben from Xian Jiaotong University.
Wu was the first plenary speaker and gave a lecture on 10 years of dedicated work in his Laboratory for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (LIAM). LIAM’s big data research models the central nervous system’s plasticity in terms of neural signal transmission delay and explores its applications for parallel computing and pattern recognitions of complex data.
Along with Wu, many other York University researchers were invited to the conference, demonstrating York’s multidisciplinary big data research capacity. Invited guests included Professors:
- Jane Heffernan (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science) spoke about multi-scale models of disease modeling,
- Jimmy Huang (School of Information Technology, Liberal Arts and Professional Studies) spoke about modeling and analyzing big text data,
- Paul Ritvo (School of Kinesiology and Health Science, Faculty of Health) spoke about data mining in health-related interventions, and
- Steven Wang (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Faculty of Science) spoke about dynamical clustering.
Yawen Xu, a postdoctoral fellow working in a NSERC CRD project supervised by Professor Aijun An (Computer Science) and Wu was also in attendance and discussed her research on multiple-platform data integration while York's industrial partner Manifold Data Mining represented by its President and CEO Mei Zhen, shared the company's experience in data mining applications to consumer behavior analysis.
The conference participants
The conference was also the platform for the launch of the first International Journal of Big Data and Information Analytics. The journal is sponsored by the National University of Defense Technology, Xian Jiaotong University and York University.
This conference series and the journal together aims to promoting cutting-edge research, technology transfer and knowledge translation about complex data and information processing.
The second annual Big Data and Information Analytics conference will be held in 2016 in Changsha, China, followed by the 2017 conference at York University.
“In today’s world of Internet of Things, York as a global leader in big data analytics and visualization is very pleased to be a founding institute of this effort bringing together a strong network of researchers from a broad range of fields to share knowledge and encourage multidisciplinary collaborative projects in the field of big data” said Sushanta Mitra, associate vice-president research at York University.