OpenGov Asia was in Beijing for the Strata Hadoop World Conference from 5th to 6th August 2016 and onsite as Tsinghua University’s Institute of Data Science announced its cooperation with Cloudera.
Mr. Doug Cutting, Chief Architect of Cloudera and the creator of Hadoop, was present during the official announcement on 5th August 2016:
“We’re seeing now big data change industries and even society but Hadoop is just a technology. In order to make this kind of changes, it takes much more than just technology. It takes lots of people working together, learning the skills and understanding how these technologies can be used effectively.
So we’re very excited, from today, to work with Tsinghua University to help them bring these skills to more people. We have two programmes at Cloudera that are involved here, what we call the Cloudera Academic Programme (CAP) where we provide course materials to universities freely around the world and today we are annoucing that we are providing these materials to Tsinghua University.
In Asia, we are also using Cloudera’s other larger initiative, also known the BASE (Big Analytics Skills Involvement) initiative to incorporate government and industry involvement in really developing the complete system of developing the right community for this technology.
BASE involves the technology from Cloudera and the university to provide training but also gets government involvement and industry involvement by providing specific career training.
This is the first effort of its kind in China and we’re very excited to launch it here today.”
Professor Han Yi Shun from Tsinghua University’s Institute of Data Science, who was also present at the event, also mentioned the school’s three primary objectives:
- To provide platforms for research collaboration opportunities
- To nurture data professionals and talent
- To spread knowledge on big data and analytics
Professor Han explained, “We know very well that learning on big data and analytics should not be just restricted to school and students should also experience practical and real world problems relating to big data.
Therefore we are keen to involve industry professionals and advisors so that students can learn under them and gain real world experience through collaborative projects. Some of the projects could even be something that students can pursue further after graduation.
Our end goal is to let governments, industry and the masses at large know that the Tsinghua University is the reference when it comes to big data knowledge, research and learning.”
According to an IDC study Capturing the $1.6 Trillion Data Dividend published in May 2014, big data solutions would help global enterprises share approximately $1.6 trillion data dividend over the next four years. This represents a massive opportunity in the big data industry and Open Source Big Data Ecosystem represented by Hadoop is the important technology support for big data and cloud computing, which improves the development of users and contributors in the open source community and drives the technology advance and business development.
China is well-poised in the worldwide boom in the demand for data professionals and the cooperation between School of Data Science Research, Tsinghua University and Cloudera will also aim at engaging international big data open source communities, to improve the activeness of participating current projects and make contributions to new open source projects.
The vision is to drive wider adoption of big data in China, while bringing China's homegrown technology back to international open source communities. Given its massive population and enormous potential in big data development and growth, the “big” in big data in China is a totally different ballgame when compared to other countries in the world.