Experts offer new solution for better adapting to age of abundant information

How can we adapt to a life of abundant information? Instead of asking people to make changes, engineering experts come up with a human centric solution by making information technology more supportive of people's needs.

Pan Yunhe, former vice president of Chinese Academy of Engineering, said to make a sea of information meet the needs of different people, the basic thing is to connect up the data .

"By establishing new association of a great amount of knowledge, we can generate a lot of new knowledge," he said, and the new knowledge can be largely individualized.

He illustrated that there are great amounts of descriptions of food in the Chinese classic novel "A Dream in Red Mansions", which describes the life and declining fortunes of a large feudal family. "We'd made the digitalized descriptions connected so that people who are interested in what people eat in the past could just click the mouse to get all the relevant information they want." he said.

Pan's idea has been applied in many areas, the latest of which is in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Chinese Academy of Engineering is now conducting a new project that digitalizes herbal information and connects it with modern pharmacologic data and analysis of disease.

"It'll be a new TCM knowledge service system, which will make China's 12,807 TCM drugs an important resource for new drugs," Pan said.

Raj Reddy, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University echoed with Pan and said "a human centric solution means getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right language and medium, with the right level of detail."

The Turing Award winner said new information technology should be able to anticipate what people want to do and help them do it with less effort, while monitoring global information sources to discover events that could impact people's safety, security and happiness.

More than 400 academicians, experts, and scholars from all over the world attended an international symposium held by the Chinese Academy of Engineering on Tuesday to discuss the topic of how digitalized knowledge can better serve science and engineering.

Gao Wen, vice director of National Natural Science Foundation of China, said that big data is key to future intelligent cities. "The future city will have a multimedia big data center, which could capture residents' information, and give solutions or suggestions to decision makers by machine learning," he said. Endit