The 4th International Conference on Big Data & Information Analytics was held at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) at Rice University in Houston from Dec. 17 to 19, 2018.
York University is one of the founding institutes for this international conference series. The University’s researchers contributed to the success of the series, previously held in Xi’an (2015) and Changsha (2016), China, and Toronto (2017), in such areas as market and medical data analytics, forced migration and vision data modelling, disaster and emergency information retrieval, and rapid simulation simulations.
In Houston, PhD candidate Zachary McCarthy from the Laboratory for Industrial & Applied Mathematics (LIAM) at York University presented LIAM’s collaborative work with the Public Health Agency of Canada on large-scale simulations of food-borne pathogen cross-contamination during industrial processing. Postdoctoral Fellow Kyeongal Nah delivered an invited talk on LIAM’s project funded by the GlaxoSmithKline on tick-borne infection prevention and immunization effectiveness evaluation using a variety of climate, surveillance and clinical data. Professor Fulian Yin, a visiting scientist to York University, introduced the ongoing collaboration between LIAM and the Chinese Media University on social media big data modelling and informatics.
“It is exciting to see York’s alumni emerge to leaders and active players in the area of big data modelling and analytics,” said University Distinguished Research Professor Jianhong Wu, a co-chair of the conference series. University of Miami Professor Xi Huo (a postdoctoral Fellow at York University from 2014-17) and University of Wyoming Professor Rongsong Liu (PhD ’06) were organizers of invited sessions. University of Connecticut Professor Guojun Gan (PhD ’07) presented his research on actuarial science big data clustering analysis.
Faculty of Health Professor James Elder, York Research Chair in Human and Computer Vision, is the co-chair of York’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence & Society. He attended the previous conferences in Changsha and Toronto. Elder notes that “the conference series provides an excellent platform to encourage an interdisciplinary approach towards big data and information analytics.”