Guiyang expo looks to merge big data and traditional craftsmanship

Premier Li Keqiang said China should build "dual engines" that couple innovative concepts, such as big data, and the craftsmanship of traditional industries for its economy when he attended the big data expo in Guiyang last week.

The China Big Data Industry Summit and China E-commerce Innovation and Development Summit, which is widely known as Guiyang Big Data Expo, was held from Wednesday to Sunday in the capital city of Southwest China's Guizhou province. It became a State-level expo this year.

"The old and new dynamics should develop together to drive and upgrade traditional industries. And the development of the virtual and real worlds should be integrated," Li said.

Globally influential experts, academics and industry insiders converged in Guiyang for the expo. More than 40,000 delegates shared their new concepts ideas for a consensus to be delivered at the conclusion of the summit.

More than 300 big data companies brought with them over 1,000 products and solutions to showcase at the expo. The event attracted about 90,000 visitors, of which about 10,000 were professionals.

According to statistics, over 80 percent of China's information resources are in government hands. The delegates expressed their wishes to work with the State to open up big data resources in an orderly and secure way according to market needs.

They also plan to push forward an agenda to converge the flow of capital, the flow of technology and the flow of talent on the basis of the flow of data, to create new opportunities for innovation and business startups.

The delegates called for society to take a proper view of big data security and urged for legal efforts to crack down on internet fraud to allow a clean and safe network.

The event is also seen as a platform where business leaders and government officials can meet to share their insights on solving problems relating to national and local economies.

As Chinese industries face numerous tasks including cutting production capacity, reducing stock and controlling leverage tools, it is not easy to prioritize when reforming the supply side.

Decision-makers always have to answer similar questions such as how the Guiyang government should spend fixed-assets investment budget reasonably and which industry needs the investment most.

The collecting and mining of big data may address these issues in the near future, according to industry experts.

He Zhong, chief information officer of Guiyang MacroData is leading his team to develop an early warning platform for the industrial economy of Guiyang on the basis of big data technologies.

The goal of the platform is to consolidate data including industrial demand, economic dynamics, employment and livelihood figures and then prepare a report for decision-makers.

"Strategic leaders, management and executors can have dialogues in the same context on this platform, rather than speaking from their own angle like in the past," He said.

According to He, the platform is a pilot project that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is developing in Guiyang, Guizhou province, because the city plans to build itself into a base for the big data industry providing flexible policies.

"Seven government departments in Guiyang have opened their data to the public. This is crucial and a prerequisite for us to mine and establish the platform," He said.

The MacroData project just settled in the Guiyang Big Data Innovation Industry (Technology) Development Center, which was launched last week in Guiyang's Guanshanhu district.

The project is just one example of efforts the Guizhou provincial government is making to foster the big data industry.

Since 2014, Guizhou has led the country's pace to develop big data as a special and innovation-driven industry. The provincial capital of Guiyang was appointed China's first State-level general pilot zone for big data.

The big data expo closed on Sunday and released a Guiyang Consensus on E-commerce. The consensus calls on the industry to reform the supply side to provide "new dynamics" for better quality and efficiency of China's economy.

Contact the writers through wanghuazhong@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/31/2016 page15)