The picture shows that the big data system helps the police to monitor and count the community access in real time.Image source: Image China
In 2015, China proposed to implement the national big data strategy. In 2017, during the second collective study in the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, General Secretary of the Supreme Leader emphasized that it is necessary to aim at the forefront of world science and technology, concentrate superior resources to break through the core technology of big data, accelerate the construction of independent and controllable big data industrial chain, value chain and ecosystem, promote the deep integration of Industry-University-Research with data as a link, form a data-driven innovation system and development model, cultivate a number of leading big data enterprises, and build a multi-level and multi-type big data talent team.
The picture shows the Zunyi "Big Data+Education" sub-venue of the 2019 China International Big Data Industry Expo.Image source: Image China
The new stage of informatization development opens a new chapter in digital economy and digital society.
Data is a faithful recorder of the development of human society, and its acquisition, processing and application have always played an important role in the development of human society. The rapid development of the Internet has brought the ubiquitous application of information technology. With this process, massive data is constantly produced, which contains great social, economic and scientific research value, and has become the third largest strategic resource after material and energy, and needs to be re-examined and developed urgently. The development of information technology provides automatic methods and means for data processing, and the concept of "big data" came into being.
Big data is not a novel word that was born in recent years. From abstract concepts to scientific research to applications in various fields, big data technology is entering a new stage of rapid development.
In 1998, American scientist John Marcy pointed out in an international conference report that with the rapid growth of data, there are bound to be four problems: data is difficult to understand, data is difficult to obtain, data is difficult to process and data is difficult to organize, and "big data" is used to describe this challenge. In 2007, Jim Gray, a pioneer in the field of database, pointed out that big data will become an effective way for human beings to touch, understand and approach complex real systems. With the help of big data, the method of "data+computer+algorithm model" provides the fourth means for human beings to explore the objective world after experimental observation, theoretical derivation and computational simulation.
If these two nodes of the concept of big data are still limited to the frontier areas of scientific and technological innovation, then the concept of big data "flies into the homes of ordinary people" marked by the best-selling of a book in 2012. This year, Victor Mayer-schoenberg, a professor at Oxford University, pointed out in his book "The Age of Big Data: Great Changes in Life, Work and Thinking" that data analysis will evolve from the traditional mode of random sampling, accurate solution and emphasis on cause and effect to a new mode of "all data", "approximate solution" and "only looking at correlation without asking cause and effect" in the era of big data.
What exactly is big data? At present, the consensus is that big data generally refers to a huge collection of data that cannot be perceived, acquired, managed, processed and served by traditional information technology and software and hardware tools in a tolerable time. It has many characteristics such as large data scale, rich sources, complex types and rapid changes. The essence of big data technology is to provide a new thinking and new means for human beings to understand complex systems. The arrival of the era of big data marks that informatization has crossed the digital stage characterized by stand-alone application and the networking stage characterized by Internet application, and officially entered the intelligent stage characterized by deep data mining and integrated application.
The new stage of informatization initiated by big data represents the brand-new application of a new generation of information technology, which breeds a more advanced economic form-digital economy with data as the main production factor, following agricultural economy and industrial economy, and accelerates the global step into the digital society. In the digital economy and digital society, data is a new type of means of production, cloud computing, Internet of Things and 5G are new production tools, artificial intelligence is a new type of productivity, and blockchain is a new type of production relationship that solves the problem that data is difficult to share openly in the Internet production relationship. The final application form of big data and new generation information technology is software, so software definition is also regarded as a new production mode in digital economy and digital society.
To improve the modernization level of national governance, big data applications are within reach.
Big data has been highly valued by many countries and industries. If big data can be effectively organized and used, it will greatly promote social economy, scientific research and national governance, and it will give birth to unprecedented opportunities. China has made great progress and achieved great results in using big data to improve the modernization level of state governance and to ensure and improve people’s livelihood.
Although it sounds abstract, big data is not far from our daily life. For example, in Beijing, Zhejiang and other parts of the country, big data is applied to simplify people’s work processes, optimize work experience and improve work efficiency. From "running back and forth" to "running at most once" and "not running at all" now, "data runs more and people run less errands". Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Guizhou and other places have set up provincial big data bureaus to comprehensively promote the transformation and upgrading of e-government and smart city construction to big data, and profoundly change the cognitive mode, thinking mode, working mode and collaboration mode of urban management. Big data is a "good helper" for the intelligent operation of cities. Various places have built "urban brains" to provide technical support for global situation awareness, quantitative analysis and judgment, and scientific and intelligent decision-making through data, so that decision-making can be unified into "one base map and multiple layers", and the wall chart can be used for command, scientific decision-making and closed-loop promotion, and the city can be managed "like embroidery" gradually.
Generally speaking, all kinds of big data analysis applications can be divided into three levels. The first layer is descriptive analysis application, which refers to summarizing and extracting relevant information and knowledge from big data to help people analyze what happened and present the development process of things. For example, big data applications in epidemic prevention and control in COVID-19 basically belong to this category: community control has "health code", grass-roots prevention and control has "close contact meter", and there are "three-color code" for resuming work and production, as well as mobile communication operators’ 14-day mobile phone main activity trajectory data query. It can be said that big data technology has become one of the important scientific and technological means for epidemic prevention and control in COVID-19.
The second layer is the application of predictive analysis, which refers to analyzing the relationship and development mode between things from big data, and predicting the development trend of things accordingly. Taking the prevention and control of epidemic situation in COVID-19 as an example, by integrating the location data of operators and Internet companies, it can quantitatively support the analysis and judgment of population flow trend, which is convenient for forecasting development trend, analyzing regional risks and realizing accurate prevention and control.
The third layer is the application of decision analysis, which refers to the analysis of the effects of different decisions and the guidance and optimization of decisions on the basis of the first two levels. Decision-making analysis emphasizes causality, not only "knowing why" but also "knowing why". For example, the organic combination of big data and epidemiology can further accurately estimate the number of high-risk areas and high-risk personnel on the basis of macro and overall trend research, and provide more scientific and accurate decision-making basis for medical resources, materials and prevention and control measures.
Big data infrastructure construction can be expected in the future.
After active exploration and practice in recent years, China has made remarkable progress in big data technology, industry and application. At the same time, the integration of big data and next-generation information technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain and Internet of Things has opened up more room for progress. Among them, considerable progress has also been made in independent innovation and research and development. We need to further strengthen independent research and development, especially concentrate resources to build an open source platform for independent innovation of the underlying technology.
Not long ago, the The Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) Conference emphasized speeding up the construction of new infrastructure such as 5G networks and data centers. Compared with traditional infrastructure construction, new infrastructure construction focuses on the new direction of industrial transformation and upgrading. Represented by big data, "new infrastructure" reflects the general trend of accelerating the development of high-end industries. Big data technology R&D personnel should seize the opportunity, do a good job in the integration of new technologies and empower the construction of "new infrastructure".
Big data is one of the important representative technologies of the global wave of digitalization, networking and intelligence. Our working style, lifestyle, connection mode and cooperation mode will be changed, optimized and perfected, and each of us will become a part of it and become a witness, witness and builder of the digital society.(author:Huang gang,Professor, Peking University Institute of Artificial Intelligence)