Last few years have seen the rapid increase of sheer amount of data produced and communicated over the Web. Such Big Data are generated from all kinds of sources and applications such as social network services, cloud services, knowledge bases, and intelligent terminals, and often in a wide variety of formats such as unstructured, semi-structured, and structured. A particular recent trend around the Web is to connect and communicate between billions of physical objects (also called “Things”), i.e. Web of Things (WoT). WoT offers the capability of integrating both physical and virtual worlds， where massive volumes of real-time data are expected to be produced by these connected things and their associated sensors.
While it is widely believed that Big Data holds the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our modern society (e.g., smart cities), many technical challenges need to be addressed before this potential can be realized. Indeed, Big Data requires a revisit of data analysis systems in fundamental ways at all stages from data acquisition and storage to data transformation and interpretation. Services should ideally be provisioned in a way that speeds up data processing, scales up with data volume, improves the adaptability and extensibility over data diversity and uncertainties, and finally turns low-level data into actionable knowledge towards better understanding and manipulation of Big Data.
BDI has the platform that goes beyond known Big Data and many relevant areas, built in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, HKUST, encouraging the most popular research areas with big data. It creates different but related technologies that happen at Big Data, such as data extraction, data integration, big data computing, data management, data mining and visualization.
Now, BDI has a lot of faculty members, research staff, and postgraduate students at work in more than 30 research groups from fundamental research in big data to real life applications with big data, such as online shopping, smart cities, health, genetic farming, finance and risk management.
BDI is committed to building a general intelligence platform based on big data, combining the research areas from data to apps with a closed loop, which technically helps the city development, thereby, improving the way people learn, work, play and live in future.