Recent years have witnessed a dramatic increase in our ability to collect data from various sensors, devices, in different formats, from independent or connected applications. This data flood has outpaced our capability to process, analyze, store and understand these datasets. Consider the Internet data. The web pages indexed by Google were around one million in 1998, but quickly reached 1 billion in 2000 and have already exceeded 1 trillion in 2008. This rapid expansion is accelerated by the dramatic increase in acceptance of social networking applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, etc., that allow users to create contents freely and amplify the already huge Web volume. Furthermore, with mobile phones becoming the sensory gateway to get real-time data on people from different aspects, the vast amount of data that mobile carrier can potentially process to improve our daily life has significantly outpaced our past CDR (call data record)-based processing for billing purposes only. It can be foreseen that Internet of things (IoT) applications will raise the scale of data to an unprecedented level. People and devices (from home coffee machines to cars, to buses, railway stations and airports) are all loosely connected. Trillions of such connected components will generate a huge data ocean, and valuable information must be discovered from the data to help improve quality of life and make our world a better place. For example, after we get up every morning, in order to optimize our commute time to work and complete the optimization before we arrive at office, the system needs to process information from traffic, weather, construction, police activities to our calendar schedules, and perform deep optimization under the tight time constraints. In all these applications, we are facing significant challenges in leveraging the vast amount of data, including challenges in (1) system capabilities (2) algorithmic design (3) business models.

This workshop aims to bring together people from both academia and industry to present their most recent work related to these big-data issues, and exchange ideas and thoughts in order to advance this big-data challenge, which has been considered as one of the most exciting opportunities in the past 10 years.