“BigDat 2018” winter school in Timisoara, Romania
9 February 2018
The West University of Timisoara hosted an international winter school on one of the most dynamic and important sectors of computer science, Big Data. The event covered a broad spectrum of industrial research and innovation with potential over scientific discoveries, medicine, engineering, business models and society. Attendees were master students, PhD students and industry practitioners from over 30 different countries (most participants from outside the country being from USA, Italy and German). Among the tutors leading the specialised sessions were Jeffrey Ullman, Stanford University, and Bing Liu, University of Illinois, Chicago.
Cohort 3 research, Orange Gao, attended the BigDat winter school to update herself about the most recent advances in the area of big data and to know current research and industrial innovation in different fields. Her major is computer science, specifically on computer vision, and there are many common algorithms with big data, so she hoped the course would help her to broaden her knowledge and understand real applications in commercial world to prepare the future career choices. She chose 3 courses, which was running in parallel during the whole event. Semantic Technologies for Open Data Publishing, which was a fantastic introduction to ontology-based data management (OBDM), Network Science Fundamentals, in which she deep-dived into recent advances in stochastic flow clustering of networks and Lifelong Learning and its Applications in NLP, which is an advanced machine learning paradigm. Since attending the winter school, her future plans are to, firstly, sort out the notes which she kept during the courses! The biggest gain she sees from BigDat was the change from thinking towards to the knowledge. She explains that researchers should not only digest necessary domain knowledge but also understand knowledge’s dynamics and constantly provide technical vision.
