On November 26-28, 2019, the 3rd International Conference on Big Data and Security (ICBDS2021) was successfully held in Shenzhen. The conference was hosted by NJIT, co-organized by King Saud University, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Jiangsu Computer Society and other domestic and foreign universities and related academic organizations, and mainly undertaken by CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology. The conference was held alongside the 17th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications, which achieved the expansion of the academic research field and the innovative thinking concept.
Yang Zhengyu (Member of the Standing Committee of the Party Committee and Vice President of NJIT), Fan Jianping (academician at the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, President of CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology and President of Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology), Zhao Wei (former President of the University of Macau and Vice President of CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology), and Ma Tinghuai (Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology) attended the opening ceremony of the conference, the award ceremony and presented speeches respectively. The conference was hosted by Yi Pan (Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, Academician of the Academy of the United Nations Sciences and Technology Organization, Academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Engineering Sciences, and Member of the Royal Society for Public Health).
At the beginning of the conference, Vice President of CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology Zhao Wei began by extending a warm welcome to the executives, guests, experts and scholars who attended the conference online and offline. In his speech, he said that focusing on key academic issues related to big data and biosafety research provided knowledge and support to enhance the application of big data and biosafety as well as economic and social development. Then, he explained the driving forces of bioinformatics in the era of big data.
As the organizer of the conference, NJIT Vice President Yang Zhengyu congratulated the conference on its scheduled convening and thanked friends at home and abroad who had been concerned with and supported the establishment and development of NJIT. He introduced the history and characteristics of NJIT. He also highlighted that the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic on a global scale presented severe challenges to the social governance systems and governance capabilities of all countries. Big data technology has significant application opportunities in the field of biosafety. The application of big data technology could build a biosafety risk monitoring and early warning network, improve the monitoring and early warning system, reinforce the building of grass-root monitoring stations, enhance the terminal discovery ability, and rapidly notify and identify new and sudden infectious diseases, major animal and plant epidemics, microbial drug resistance, biotechnology environmental safety and other information, in order to achieve early detection, early warning and early response. This conference would jointly discuss, study and exchange the theory and practice, academic hotspots and development trends of big data and information security and biosecurity in engineering applications, providing a broader and more integrated communication and sharing platform for research into big data and network information security. He expected that the conference would, as always, uphold the academic spirit of pioneering, seeking truth, tolerance and equality, and achieving successful academic research results.
Professor Ma Tinghuai, Chairman of the Conference, presented the background information and schedule of the conference to on-site experts and scholars.
After the opening ceremony, a keynote report was presented, entitled “Biomedical Big Data and Security”. Professor Peng Shaoliang (Chang Jiang Scholar and Deputy Director of National Supercomputing Center in Changsha), Professor Li Yixue (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Professor Shen Bairong (Fudan University), Professor Wei Dongqing (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Professor Xu Xiaolong (Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology) and many other well-known scholars addressed keynote speeches at the conference. The experts and scholars attending the conference discussed and exchanged ideas relevant to the themes of big data and information security, as well as the theory and practice of biosafety in engineering applications. Experts stated that even after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the application of next-generation information technology in China’s biosafety governance required improvements, and the application of new technologies (e.g., big data analysis and artificial intelligence) required enhancements. “The government shall overcome the industry barriers between different subjects of biological and new-generation information technology industries, and encourage thorough cooperation between China’s leading information technology organizations and biotechnology businesses, hospitals, national health monitoring system units and other organizations; enhance the application of artificial intelligence and edge computing in biotechnology research and development to increase the effectiveness of biomedical research and accelerate the process of new drug development.” “It also needed to increase the application of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, block chain technology in biosafety monitoring and early warning as well as COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control, to provide strong technical support for the construction of the national infectious disease and public health emergencies monitoring information system, health big data monitoring information platform system, and improve the scientific prevention and control of biosafety risks and management performance.”
In the following two days, authors of the conference papers conducted more than 90 online and offline reports and defense sessions in 21 branch venues, exchanged and shared the frontier progress in bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and other fields, analyzed opportunities and challenges faced by related fields, and jointly discussed the development trends and key scientific and technological issues of bioinformatics and artificial intelligence in the era of big data. The reports and exchanges conducted in the branch venues inspired the innovative ideas of the participants and laid a foundation for the preparation of cooperative research.
Fan Jianping, President of Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and President of CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, attended and delivered a speech at the award ceremony on November 27. He congratulated the two conferences’ success, confirmed the academic exchanges and cooperation between Nanjing Institute of Engineering and CAS Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, and affirmed that the two universities would further cooperate in numerous ways in the future.
Tian Yuan (founding chairman of the International Conference on Big Data and Security and Associate Professor of the School of Computer Engineering of NJIT), presented paper submissions to the conference and announced the venue of the next conference.
It was reported that this conference received more than 221 papers from many countries and regions and admitted more than 54 papers. All accepted articles would be collected and searched by EI in the Big Data and Security Proceedings published by Springer, the world’s largest science and technology publishing house. The most impressive papers would be recommended to several SCI journals for publication. The 2022 International Conference on Big Data and Security will be held at Xiamen University. The “International Conference on Big Data and Security”, which has been held three times so far, has attracted wide attention from experts and scholars in the field of big data and network information security technology. The presented research results have been generally recognized, and the academic and social influence have been continuously improved.
With the significant improvement in the quality and the growing influence of the “International Conference on Big Data and Security” hosted by NJIT, we have further extended cooperation in China and overseas, upgrading the global impact of engineering, computer science and other disciplines within NJIT.
