How China should grasp the opportunity of innovation in the big Data age

With the development of sensor technology and the maturity of large scale computing base units, a large number of data are produced, including social media data, meteorological data, geo-map data, traffic flow data and so on. These big data will undoubtedly help us to better identify and solve the city's problems.

According to Wikibon's report, the global data market in 2013, the overall size of 18.1 billion U.S. dollars, the annual increase of 61%, is expected to continue to maintain a growth rate of 30% per cent by 2017. And the Ministry of Communications Research Institute recently released the "Big Data white paper" pointed out that at present and in the future for some time, China faces the economic restructuring and upgrading, government and public service improvement and other urgent tasks, these aspects of large data have broad application prospects.

So how should China grasp the opportunities for innovation in the big Data age?

MIT has been seen as the cradle of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. At the MIT Sloan-Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum held in Beijing recently, participants demonstrated a series of typical applications of large data, which provided references and lessons for the innovation of China's big data.

At the same time, experts pointed out that China also needs to further improve the system, including academic freedom, autonomy and autonomy, the protection of intellectual property rights, the development of venture capital and the standard exit mechanism, social restrictions on government power, etc., can truly achieve the development of science and technology to promote the economy.

Solve the challenges in big cities

The advancement of urbanization has brought us a modern life, but also produced a series of problems, such as traffic congestion, increase energy consumption and environmental pollution.

In the past, it is very difficult for the Government to solve these problems, because the composition of the city is very complicated and far-reaching. Today, with the development of sensor technology and the maturity of large-scale computing base units, a large number of data are produced, including social media data, meteorological data, geo-map data, traffic flow data and so on. These big data will undoubtedly help us to better identify and solve the city's problems.

In the above context, Microsoft's lead researcher Jeong and his colleagues put forward the concept of urban computing, including urban perception, urban data management, urban data mining and urban data to provide four links.

"The four links to form a loop, without disturbing the normal life of people, the automatic improvement of people, cities, life, simply, we need to use large data to solve the challenges in big cities." "Jeong said.

Air quality monitoring is a typical application field of urban computing. It is understood that Beijing has established 22 air quality monitoring stations, but in Jeong's view, this number is still very limited. At the same time, Jeong points out that the air quality in a city is uneven, and that the air quality readings at different locations at the same times can be very far apart, and that sometimes the readings may vary considerably even when they are very close.

According to Jeong, the main reason for this is that air quality is determined by a number of complex factors, including traffic flow, meteorological conditions, land use planning, how many factories, parks and so on.

In addition, affected by the above factors, air quality at different locations varies with time.

In response to this situation, Jeong and his colleagues in the air quality data based on the addition of a number of dimensions of large data, including meteorological conditions, traffic data and so on, and then combined with these data, build a model of air quality. According to Jeong, based on the model, we can calculate the fine degree of Beijing air quality of one square kilometer.

"So we can know when to run and when to bring the kids out." At the same time, this is our next step to solve the air pollution premise-we must first know which place is always contaminated, in order to make analysis. "Jeong said.

The broad prospect of crowdsourcing platform

In addition to applications in the field of environmental monitoring, participants also shared a project on the crowdsourcing platform for large data technology solutions. For those small and medium-sized enterprises that lack large data, the platform can better meet the needs of large data analysis.

Today, the value of large data has caused more and more enterprises to pay attention to. However, many companies consider the application of large data, the first thought is to hire large data personnel, and then form a large data team or department.

But in the MITTR/SMR China team's De Cenyu view, the enterprise's this idea faces many difficulties. First, it requires very specialized knowledge to solve large data. Large data is not only large, there are many other features, such as data is fluid, to be interpreted in real time, and the structure of the data is uneven, a certain degree of ambiguity and so on.

"In this case, if the enterprise does not have a very professional knowledge, it is unrealistic to want to organize a large data team to solve the problem." "De Cenyu said.

Secondly, the scarcity of large data talent, leading to high cost of employing, for many enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises this is difficult to bear.

In De Cenyu's view, crowdsourcing is a feasible approach in the case of large data applications facing risks and cost problems in many companies.

According to De Cenyu's vision, you can build a platform called Dlabs. There are two main users on the platform, one is the data scientists, they can solve a variety of data problems on the platform, the other is enterprises, these enterprises accumulate a lot of data, but do not know how to analyze the data, do not know how to find new business opportunities from the data. Dlabs provides a platform for business and data scientists to collaborate.

In the platform's operating mechanism, according to De Cenyu Introduction, Dlabs In addition to the data crowdsourcing contest this main form, but also provides for the participants in the project cumulative points, as well as training, information, conferences, data base and other service forms.

In De Cenyu's view, this crowdsourcing approach has many advantages. For example, with a wide range of participants and different skills and perspectives, it is easier for these participants to deliver a breakthrough than a few specialized solutions by providing a large number of different solutions. In addition, it can help enterprises to find talent, and in the acquisition of solutions at the same time, good control of costs.

China needs more change

The innovation of these large data is worth China's reference and references. However, technological innovation and entrepreneurship are sometimes not just ideas and ideas, but more importantly, innovative environments and institutions.

It is understood that the MIT students have created more than 30,000 companies, and this number is also increasing by 9 million a year. These companies created oar jobs and achieved an annual income of about 2 trillion dollars.

In contrast, while China's publications and patents are the world's leading, the results of research by Chinese universities are not as high as they are expected to boost local businesses and the local economy.

Huang, the deputy dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management, said at the forum that if China is to translate high-tech inputs into real economic results, it must change the existing system.

In Huang's view, China's past growth was mainly based on resources such as capital and labor, and the requirements for the system were not very high, as long as there was good savings and infrastructure, a stable business environment, a certain moderation in wage growth and commonsense economic policies, economic growth could be achieved.

But today, if China is to truly rely on science and technology to promote economic growth, we must put forward higher requirements for the system, including academic freedom, autonomy and autonomy, intellectual property rights protection, venture capital development and normative exit mechanism. In addition, the society is required to have certain restrictions on government power.

"If you look at these standards, China is still a long way from these institutional features," he said. "Huang said.

Shao, vice president and senior researcher of LUN International Research Institute, holds a similar view. He pointed out that in order for a business to succeed, it had to deal properly with its stakeholders, including products, services, labor, suppliers, finance, land, infrastructure and so on. At the same time, each stakeholder is a huge domestic and international market.

So what the government has to do is to provide a trading platform while defining property rights and settling disputes. "American innovation is better because the interests of American companies and their corresponding markets are very developed, and there is a system of solutions to property rights, transactions and disputes." "Shao said.

In Shao's view, China has gradually established a set of modern enterprise operating systems in the course of its economic growth over the past few decades, but if economic development is to shift from a resource-driven to a technological innovation drive such as the US, more institutional changes are needed.