Preface

摘要

The amount of data stored in computer systems has greatly increased in recent years due in part to advances in networking technologies, storage systems, the adoption of mobile and cloud computing and the wide deployment of sensors for data collection. To make sense of this big data to support decision-making, the field of Big Data Analytics has emerged as a key research and application area for industry and other organizations. Numerous applications of big data analytics are found in several important and diverse fields such as e-commerce, finance, healthcare, education, e-governance, media and entertainment, security and surveillance, smart cities, telecommunications, agriculture, astronomy, and transportation. Analysis of big data raises several challenges such as how to handle massive volumes of data, process data in real-time, and deal with complex, uncertain, heterogeneous and streaming data, which are often stored in multiple remote repositories. To address these challenges, innovative big data analysis solutions must be designed by drawing expertise from recent advances in several fields such as big data processing, data mining, database systems, statistics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. There is also an important need to build data analysis systems for emerging applications such as vehicular networks and social media analysis, and to facilitate the deployment of big data analysis techniques.