In recent years, Big Data have become a hot topic in every corner of the society, ranging from government affairs to daily life of ordinary people, from dinner conversations to news reports, and from industry to academia. The philosophy and ideas of collecting and using a huge amount of data to learn and to predict have had a great impact on how we shape the information technology and how we think about artificial intelligence, deeply changing many aspects of our lives. However, although many methods have been proposed for Big Data analysis, and many success applications have been witnessed, the extent of the Big Data Research is far away from being well defined. More importantly, there are deep gaps among data producers, method developers and potential users of the data and methods.
This proposal brings together researchers interested in data sciences to brainstorm about what is possible and what ought to be possible in Big Data research and applications. Statisticians, mathematicians, economists, computer scientists, doctors from famous hospitals, industry leaders as well as government officials will be invited to present their understandings and share their perspectives on Big Data.

Intended Outcomes:
We would like to achieve the following: (a) the articulation of a new international research agenda for theoretical and applied research on Big Data; (b) establishing Tsinghua as a center of Big Data research in China; (c) bringing together data producers, method developers and potential users so that they have a better grasp of each other's work.