On October 18, 2020, the award ceremony of the 2nd IKCEST “The Belt and Road” International Big Data Competition and the 6th Baidu & Xi’an Jiaotong University Big Data Competition was held in Xi’an. After more than 90 days of fierce competition, 16 teams from all over the world stood out as this year’s winners.

       Winners were presented awards by Zheng Nanning, CAE Member and professor of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Zhang Maizeng, Secretary of the Party Committee at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Wang Haifeng, CTO of Baidu, Liu Chang, Deputy Director of Division of Information Infrastructure and Resources, General Administration Department of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and Director of Division of International Cooperation of IKCEST.

       Zheng Nanning said that artificial intelligence is no longer a specialty with high entry threshold, but has been applied in all corners of society, playing an irreplaceable role in the future development of human beings. “The emergence of big data or deep learning has brought a data-centered paradigm, which has brought a greater use and broader development space for human intelligence.”

       Wang Haifeng believes that artificial intelligence, as the core driving force of the fourth Industrial Revolution, is changing our way of production and life, which requires the cultivation of more talents in AI. At present, Baidu has cooperated with all sectors of society to help nurture 5 million AI talents in the next five years, and to promote the intelligent upgrade of the whole society.

       "Today, the world is led by science and technology,” Liu said, “and the international race of science and technology can be boiled down to the competition of talents. As the guiding unit of this competition, the Chinese Academy of Engineering hopes that outstanding young scientific and technological talents be found and cultivated through this competition. We also hope to promote the concept of community of human destiny, so as to realize the value of the community of scientific and technological innovation. "

       To build the world's top big data event, the competition theme set closely to the current hot spots

    For the first time, this competition is related to medical topics, and the title is set as “Forecasting the future incidence of highly pathogenic contagious diseases”. This competition breaks the “dimensional wall” between AI and real medicine. It is aimed to use big data technology to help forecast and control the spread of infectious diseases, enhance the awareness and ability of human society to cooperate against risks, and provide a platform for young people to participate in social issues.

       As one of the world’s top big data events, this competition has attracted more than 3,000 teams and nearly 5,000 participants from 580 universities in 22 countries on five continents, including world famous universities such as Harvard University, Imperial University of Technology, University of London and 42 domestic double first-class universities. Among them, 28 colleges and universities in the United States alone signed up to this competition and countries like South Africa, Russia, India also formed teams to participate for the first time.

       Wang Chen, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was invited as the special advisor. The Advisory Committee comprised experts and academicians such as Raj Reddy (Turing Award Laureate, CAE Foreign Member), Pan Yunhe(CAE Member), Zheng Nanning(CAE Member), Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan (Fellow of Indian Institute of Science), Zheng Qinghua (Vice-President of Xi'an Jiaotong University), Zhang Wenhong (Head of the Center for Infectious Disease in Huashan Hospital), and Wang Haifeng (CTO of Baidu), etc. They have promoted the internationalization and professionalism of the event.

       The most practical contestants! The winning team hopes to apply what they have learned to the benefit of society

       There were 16 top teams in the Final this year, with a finalist rate of only 0.5%. “Come back after BDC”, the team from Xi’an Jiaotong University, won the International Outstanding Award, the highest award of the competition. Judges evaluated this team as “having strong data insight ability; being able to use data visualization for in-depth analysis and understanding”. The award-winning scheme has outstanding performance in Feature Engineering robustness, as well as strong innovation and generalization ability of model scheme. The overall scheme is considered to be of great practical value.

       The unique talent training mode based on big data competition platform has also been unanimously recognized by contestants, university teachers and industry experts. In the competition, the contestants participated in specific projects, completed one task after another. By doing so, they combined theory with practice in a flexible way, and found solutions in the process of repeated learning and practice. Many contestants said that the three-month competition was an excellent process to integrate their knowledge.