Big Data

Introduction

Biological research has entered into an era of big data including a wide variety of biodiversity data from all life forms on earth and covering a broad range of health data from multiple omics levels as well as from clinics, physiology, lifestyle, and environment. In addition, such data are being generated at ever-growing rates and distributed throughout the world with heterogeneous standards and diverse limited access capabilities.

Thus, providing open access to big data is essential for an expedited translation of big data into applied knowledge and is becoming increasingly vital in advancing scientific research and promoting human healthcare and precise medical treatment. In this Big Data Session, experts with experiences from major global data centers and representatives from international societies on data will share their opinions on the following topics: Challenges in data sharing for developing countries, Incentives for data sharing, Effective ways for managing controlled-access data, Co-operation in research data policies and management at national and international levels, The development of cloud systems for data sharing, Education and training for big data mining and analyses, Data-driven applications, successful stories.

Speaker Information

Name: Yiming Bao

Affiliation: National Genomics Data Center, Beijing

Email: baoym@big.ac.cn

Self-introduction:

Dr. Yiming Bao is the Director of National Genomics Data Center and BIG Data Center, Beijing Institute of Genomics (BIG), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and a Professor in “100-Talent” Program of CAS. He received a B.S. degree from Peking University, Beijing, China in 1987, and a Ph.D. from John Innes Centre (through University of East Anglia), UK, in 1994. Before joining BIG in 2017, Dr. Bao was a Staff Scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)/NLM/NIH, USA, where he managed the NCBI Influenza Virus Resource and the virus classification tool PASC, among other duties on the NCBI viral genome project. Dr. Bao authored more than 60 research articles, and received the 2006 NIH Merit Award. His research interests are on biology databases, virus genome annotation, and virus evolution and classification. Dr. Bao is the Deputy Director of National Institutes of Data Science in Health and Medicine, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Name: Rorie Edmunds

Affiliation: World Data System of the International Science Council

Email: rorie.edmunds@icsu-wds.org

Self-introduction:

Rorie Edmunds joined the World Data System – International Programme Office in August 2012 as Programme Officer. He became Acting Executive Director in June 2018. Rorie was co-chair of the working group that developed the Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements which form the basis of the CoreTrustSeal certification standard. He is now an ex officio member of the CoreTrustSeal Board, and one of the leaders of the Secretariat.

Rorie previously worked as a Technical Editor in Tokyo, aiding Japanese scientists and academics from many scientific disciplines to publish their work in English. Before this, he held various research positions in universities in the UK and in Japan. His first degree is in mathematics and he holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, both of which were gained from the University of Bath.

Name: Simon Hodson

Affiliation: CODATA, the Committee on Data of the International Science Council

email: simon@codata.org

Self-introduction:

Simon Hodson has been Executive Director of CODATA since August 2013. Simon is an expert on data policy issues and research data management. He has contributed to influential reports on Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and to the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World. Most recently he chaired the European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR Data which produced the report Turning FAIR into Reality.

As part of his CODATA role, Simon is closely involved in an ISC and CODATA initiative to improve the coordination of standards for data integration and interoperability for interdisciplinary research and in the coordination of the CODATA Data Policy Committee.

Simon has a strong research background, as well as considerable project and programme management experience: from 2009 to 2013, as Programme Manager, he led two successful phases of Jisc's innovative Managing Research Data programme in the UK.

Name: Yasukazu (Yaz) Nakamura

Affiliation: DNA Data Bank of Japan, National Institute of Genetics

Email: yn@nig.ac.jp

Self-introduction:

Yasukazu Nakamura - received the Ph.D in genetics from SOKENDAI (Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan) in the year 2000. From the year 2009, he has been a professor of National Institute of Genetics and SOKENDAI, and has worked for DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ), which is a partner of INSDC with GenBank and European Nucleotide Archive. His research interest includes genome science for plants and microbes, and biological databases.

Name: Weimin Zhu

Affiliation: National Center for Protein Sciences. Beijing

Email: wmzhuworld@gmail.com

Self-introduction:

Professor of data science group at National Center for Protein Sciences (Beijing), was the Director of Bioinformatics Center at Institute of Basic Medical Science, Institute of Basic Medicine, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and Head of Database Applications at European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK. As a veteran bioinformatian, Weimin has spent last 30 years of his career, in Canada, Great Britain and China, on the development and service activities in database systems for the collection, management, integration, annotation, distribution and mining of biomedical data. He is also an advocate in open scientific data initiatives and the standardization of biomedical data to facilitate the data interoperability and relationship discovery. His research interests include novel technologies and tool development in 1) Semantic data integration by ontology and metadata-driven approaches, and 2) Informatics infrastructure to manage, annotate and retrieve biological big data in high performance computing environment.

General Programme