Title: Data Science and Advanced Analytics: Innovation and Practices

Speaker: Longbing Cao, University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Abstract: In 2005, when I started to talk about data science, someone asked me what is data science and why we need it since we have had information science. As we know, classic analytical and learning systems have been built on the assumption that data is independent and identically distributed (IID). In this talk, a brief review is given about the challenges triggered by such an IID assumption on tackling complex data and applications, in particular, discussions are about non-IIDness learning which caters for the coupling relationships and heterogeneity in the real world. Several showcases will introduce my advanced analytics practices in Australia in different domains, including public sector, banking, education, capital market, and transport.

Bio: Longbing Cao was awarded one PhD in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems in Chinese Academy of Sciences and another in Computing Science from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He has been a full professor in information technology at UTS since 2009, and the Founding Director of the university’s research institute Advanced Analytics Institute since 2011.
He is also the Research Leader of the Data Mining Program at the Australian Capital Markets Cooperative Research Centre, the Chair of ACM SIGKDD Australia and New Zealand Chapter, IEEE Task Force on Data Science and Advanced Analytics, and IEEE Task Force on Behavioral, Economic and Socio-cultural Computing, to promote the relevant research and community building. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, SMC Society and Computer Society.
Longbing initiated and leads research on non-iidness learning in big data, behavior informatics, agent mining, and domain driven data mining, in addition to general efforts on data mining, machine learning, applied analytics, and complex intelligent systems. He is now working with around a large team consisting of PhD students, research masters and fellows, and visiting scholars on the following primary research interests, which led to 3 monographs, 4 edited books and 15 proceedings, 11 book chapters, and around 200 referred journal/conference publications.
Longbing’s leadership has spread from manager and Chief Technology Officer in business to director of research institution. In business, he managed hundreds of millions of fund involving managing multi-million large projects. Since he joined UTS in 2005, under his leadership, the UTS Advanced Analytics Institute, a cross-faculty university research institute, is effectively implementing a mixture business model by integrating high-quality Research, high-calibre Education with high-impact Development (RED) in data science and broad-based big data analytics, to best advance theoretical innovation, education and training, and hands-on practices in the real-world big data analytics through a highly interdisciplinary and cross-domain engaging approach. Longbing created the first globally available research degrees in analytics: Master of Analytics (Research) and PhD Thesis: Analytics. Under his leadership, within three years since its establishment, UTS:AAI was recognized as the first research group in analytics in Australia with demonstrated wide engagements and high business impact recognized by the community such as in the first whitepaper on big data issued by the Australian federal government, two of three commonwealth papers on big data, and several other special mentions such as in ABC, ATO, OECD and InnovationAus.
Longbing has wide connections with world industry and academic leaders in the area of big data, data science and analytics, as evidenced by the prestigious events he chairs and founded, including the most influential and largest big data conference KDD2015 in Sydney as the lead general chair, and the annual Big Data Summit and the IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics he founded.