Moderators: Prof. Qing Li, Prof. Kamal Karlapalem

Panelists: Prof. Jiannong Cao, Prof. Zhiguo Gong, Prof. Weijia Jia, Prof. Xiaohua Jia, Prof. Xiaofang Zhou

Data science is computation heavy. Modern deep learning techniques run on computers for days together to determine the final useful results. Any data science solution is costly – modeling cost, people, cost, data cost, computing cost, and use cost. Among all these, the people's cost and computing cost is a significant portion. The panel will discuss the following aspects –

1. What are the current hardware and software stacks for (current) data science?

2. How much do they cost? Can they be optimized?

3. What are the imminent and long-term challenges for reducing these costs?

4. Is there a possibility or opportunity for researchers to work towards new modes of computing for data science?

5. What will the future data science be? What are the challenges and opportunities for us?

• Prof. Jiannong Cao
  Dr. Cao is currently a Chair Professor of Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He is also the director of the Internet and Mobile Computing Lab (IMCL) in the department and the director of University’s Research Facility in Big Data Analytics (UBDA). His research interests include parallel and distributed computing, wireless sensing and networks, pervasive and mobile computing, and big data and cloud computing. He has co-authored 5 books, co-edited 9 books, and published over 600 papers in major international journals and conference proceedings. He received Best Paper Awards from conferences including, IEEE Trans. Industrial Informatics 2018, IEEE DSAA 2017, IEEE SMARTCOMP 2016, IEEE/IFIP EUC 2016, IEEE ISPA 2013, IEEE WCNC 2011, etc. Dr. Cao has directed and participated in over 90 research and development projects and, as a principal investigator, obtained over HK$60 million grants from funding agencies such as National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), Ministry of Science and Technology of P. R. China (MOST), Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC), Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission (ITC), Hong Kong Construction Industry Council, The Society of Hong Kong Scholars, and industries like Alibaba, Huawei, IBM and Nokia. Dr. Cao has also involved in the development of 13 patents. Dr. Cao served the Chair of the Technical Committee on Distributed Computing of IEEE Computer Society 2012-2014, a member of IEEE Fellows Evaluation Committee of the Computer Society and the Reliability Society, a member of IEEE Computer Society Education Awards Selection Committee, a member of IEEE Communications Society Awards Committee, and a member of Steering Committee of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. Dr. Cao has also served as chairs and members of organizing and technical committees of many international conferences, and as associate editor and member of the editorial boards of many international journals. Dr. Cao is a fellow of IEEE and ACM distinguished member. In 2017, he received the Overseas Outstanding Contribution Award from China Computer Federation.
  
  
  
• Prof. Zhiguo Gong
  Gong Zhiguo is a Full Professor and the Head of the Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau. He also works in the State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart. He got his Bachelor Degree from Hebei Normal University in 1983, Master Degree from Peking University in 1988, and PhD from Chinese Academy of Science in 1998. Currently, Professor Gong’s research interests include Online Mining Techniques for Social Media Data, POI Identifications and Recommendations, and Data Crawling Techniques from the Hidden Databases. His research results are published in several prestigious venues, including SIGIR, CIKM, IJCAI, ICDE, VLDB, SIGMOD，TODS, TIST,TKDE, and VLDBJ. He was the General Co-Chairs for IEEE/WIC/ACM WI/IAT 2012, WAIM2014, and Apweb-WAIM2018, the local Co-Chairs for ICDE2019 and IJCAI2019, the PC Co-Chairs for PAKDD2019, and PC Members for CIKM2016, VLDB2019, and Dasfaa2019. He is the associate editor for the journal ‘Distributed and Parallel Databases’ and the journal ‘International Journal of Wavelets and Multiresolution and Information Processing.
  
  
  
• Prof. Weijia Jia
  Weijia Jia is currently a Chair Professor, Deputy Director of State Kay Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City at the University of Macau. He has been a Zhiyuan Chair Prof at Shanghai Jiaotong University, China. He received BSc/MSc from Center South University, China in 82/84 and Master of Applied Sci./PhD from Polytechnic Faculty of Mons, Belgium in 92/93, respectively, all in computer science. For 93-95, he joined German National Research Center for Information Science (GMD) in Bonn (St. Augustine) as a research fellow. From 95-13, he worked in City University of Hong Kong as a professor. His contributions have been reconganized as optimal network routing and deployment; vertex cover; anycast and QoS routing, and sensors networking; knowledge relation extractions; NLP and edge computing. He has over 500 publications in the prestige international journals/conferences and research books and book chapters. He has received best product awards from the Internatonal Science&Tech. Expos (Shenzhen) in 2011/2012 and 1st- Prize of Scientific Research Awards from Ministry of Education of China in 2017 (list 2). He has served as area editor for various prestige international journals, chair and PC member/keynote speaker for many top international conferences. He is the Fellow of IEEE and the Distinguished Member of CCF.
  
  
  
• Prof. Xiaohua Jia
  Xiaohua Jia is currently the chair professor with the Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong. His research interests include cloud computing and distributed systems, computer networks, wireless sensor networks and mobile wireless networks. He is an editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2006-2009), Wireless Networks, Journal of World Wide Web, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, etc. He is the general chair of ACM MobiHoc 2008, TPC co-chair of IEEE MASS 2009, area-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2010, TPC co-chair of IEEE GlobeCom 2010-Ad Hoc and Sensor Networking Symposium, and Panel co-chair of IEEE INFOCOM 2011. He is a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society.
  
  
  
• Prof. Xiaofang Zhou
  Dr Xiaofang Zhou is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of Queensland, Leader of UQ Data Science Research Group and an IEEE Fellow. Xiaofang received his BSc and MSc degrees in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China, and PhD in Computer Science from UQ. Before joining UQ in 1999, he worked as a researcher in Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), leading its Spatial Information Systems group. His research focus is to find effective and efficient solutions for managing, integrating and analyzing very large amount of complex data for business, scientific and personal applications. He has been working in the area of spatiotemporal and multimedia databases, data mining, data quality management, high performance query processing, big data analytics and machine learning, co-authored over 300 research papers. He received Best Paper Awards of WISE 2012&2013, ICDE 2015, DASFAA 2016 and ADC 2019. He was the Program Committee Chair of Australasian Database Conferences (ADC 2002 and 2003), International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE 2004), Asia Pacific Web Conferences (APWeb 2003 and 2006), International Conference on Databases Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2009, 2012 and 2015), International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (CoopIS 2012), IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2013), ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2016), International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD 2017) and International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2020). He is a General Co-Chair of ACM Multimedia Conference 2015, IEEE International Conference on Data Management (MDM 2018) and China Big Data Technology Conference 2017. He was a keynote speaker at WISE 2008, CIKM 2015, DEXA 2018 and MDM 2019. He has been on the program committees of numerous international conferences, often as a Senior PC member, including SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, WWW, ACM Multimedia, ICDM, ICDCS, ICDM, AAAI and SIGKDD. He was the Convenor and Director of ARC Research Network in Enterprise Information Infrastructure from 2004-2011 (a major national research collaboration initiative in Australia), and the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL Australian Chapter from 2010-2011. Currently he is an Associate Editor of The World Wide Web Journal, Distributed and Parallel Databases, Knowledge and Information Systems, and Springer's Encyclopedia of Database Systems. He was the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (2015 - 2018). He is on the Steering Committees of ICDE, DASFAA, WISE, APWeb, Australasian Database Conferences and BigComp conferences. In the past he was an Associate Editor of The VLDB Journal (2008-2015), IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, Information Processing Letters, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2009 - 2015), and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (2013-2019).