On the morning of July 16, 2021, Prof. Jian Pei, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academician of Canadian Academy of Engineering, IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow from Simon Fraser University was invited to deliver a speech at the "Online Lecture Hall" on the topic of " Towards Trustworthy Data Science: Interpretability, Fairness and Marketplaces". The series of online academic lectures were jointly organized by the School of Electrical Engineering of Chongqing University, the State Key Laboratory of Power Transmission Equipment and System Security, and were hosted by Professor Ren Zhouyang, Dean Assistant of the School.
On behalf of the School, Professor Ren Zhouyang extended a warm welcome to Professor Pei Jian and gave a brief overview of Prof. Pei's research topic and speech outline.
Professor Pei Jian explained how data science can make a positive impact on the world and specifically highlighted the challenges and obstacles that must be overcome. Prof. Pei illustrated how smart industrial chains can be applied to alleviate poverty by explaining the high trust costs faced by data science when dealing with information from different groups, such as agricultural products, customer demands and logistics chains; the challenges of using models to simulate multiple players such as logistics, government, and business partners; and the challenges of working together to maintain a dynamic ecosystem for different businesses and customers to achieve sustainable poverty relief goals. According to Prof. Pei, the use of data analytics to solve the poverty problem is comparable to solving the contradiction between supply and demand of electric power, and Data Science goes far beyond simple algorithms.
To summarize the lecture, Prof. Pei stated that data science mainly involves three parties: data owners, data scientists, and industry users, and must solve the three main problems of effective data collaboration, obtaining credible models, and creating ecological value. Prof. Pei also stressed the importance of the sense of responsibility, for that the data science workers have to make sure that it can affect our lives in positive ways.
In terms of final Q&A session, students and teachers asked questions about interdisciplinary research. Prof. Pei suggested to focusing on the law of development and encouraged students to discover problems in order to better solve the problems with the pursuit of preciseness and persistence.
