Published on Sep. 2, 2016

The problem of big data has become increasingly importance in recent years. On the one hand, big data is an asset that potentially can offer tremendous value or reward to the data owners. On the other hand, it poses tremendous challenges to distil the value out of the big data. The very nature of big data poses challenges not only due to its volume, and velocity of being generated, but also its variety, where variety means the data can be collected from various sources with different formats from structured data to text to network/graph data, etc. In this talk, we focus on the variety issue and discuss the recent development in fusion of information from multiple data sources, which can be applied to multiple applications and disciplines. As the number and variety of social networks aimed at different purposes increase rapidly, users nowadays are participated in multiple online networks simultaneously to enjoy various services. How to fuse information spreading across multiple networks to achieve better understanding of customers and provide higher quality of services becomes the Holy Grail. Social networks will be used as an example to explain how to address the data fusion issue.