The University of Macau (UM) recently held a lecture titled ‘Beyond AlphaGo: Opportunities and Challenges for Both IT and Non-IT Majors’. Prof Wei Zhao, the rector of UM, was the keynote speaker. In the talk, Prof Zhao revealed the enormous hidden business opportunities in an era of big data, and encouraged the audience to consider the challenges and opportunities of the next generation of data trading legally and policy-wise.  

Prof Zhao revealed that the internet started many years ago, with the promise that information technology will eliminate poverty. Now the internet is popularised but the rich and poor are polarised. According to Prof Zhao, the reason for this unexpected development is that a large amount of data has been available but is not effectively shared, and as a result, the rich become richer because they have almost free access to how poor people access the internet. Prof Zhao believes that one of the greatest problems with big data is that the data is neither fairly shared nor efficiently exchanged. He advocates treating data like a commodity, but added that unlike traditional commodities, there is no standardised unit of measurement to ‘weigh’ data, which will bring many challenges and opportunities legally and policy-wise. Prof Zhao stressed that data trading will subvert the trading system that has been used for thousands of years, adding that establishing fair public policies and efficient trading mechanisms and inventing a ‘data scale’ will be the key to successful data trading.

Prof Zhao is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). His research team has received numerous awards, including an outstanding paper award from the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, a best paper award from the IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conference, a best paper award from the IEEE International Communication Conference, and a technology transfer award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States. In 2011, he was appointed by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology as the chief scientist of a project on the Internet of Things under the National 973 Programme. He has served as the dean of the School of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the US, director of the Division of Computer and Network Systems in the US National Science Foundation, and the senior associate vice president for research at Texas A&M University.


Source: Communications Office
 

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