A 878% over subscription on our Hong Kong Data Ecology

Developing Data Sense across Disciplines – A note to our student fellows

It will not surprise you if there is a 878% over subscription of an IPO exercise or an open sales of any residential property in Hong Kong. Upon closure of a 9 days enrollment exercise of our Data Hackathon for student in our universities, We received 439 applications in competing the 50 seats program.

Big Data, at large, shall be the most important transformation to our daily life & business environment in the next decades. The frontier application has already been with us from marketing to agriculture, from public security to medical services. In order to advance as a whole, our society needs more talent from different fields of profession to understand digital transformation by foster our data sense, addressing data problem by asking proper question, sorting out digital solution by associating multiple sources & forms of data. Any attempt to improve our digital capability is an investment without instant monetary return while we are glad that more than 400 fellow student commit to invest their time and make our society better.

The student hackathon, as a part of our 6-month campaign of “B4B 2017 – Digital Transformation” being held by B4B Limited and co-organized by HKU and Prudential, is hosted by Mr. Herbert Chia, the former Data VP of Alibaba Group. Mr. Chia will present a daily life environment to the participant and coach them how to perceive the problems and to solve them in a data manner on 23rd & 30th September, 2017.

Looking into the information of the enrollment entries, we are so delighted and compel to share some insight with all our fellows.

Within the 439 enrollment, they come a wide spread of our 6 universities and 4 overseas universities with associate program with ours. This witnesses the support of data development from our tertiary education system. In the past few years, our universities set up different data science programs in all level of designation which involves a huge amount of resources and efforts.

Beside a surprising number of entries, the wide spread of discipline is other encouraging phenonium.. Data shall become the blood and flesh to help our society running in more effective & efficient way. The impact & application should be cross industry. Apart from 3 traditional data related disciplines, Engineering, Science & Business, there are 23 % enrolments come from 7 other disciplines It is extremely encouraging that t snow ball of data adaption is starting to roll.

From a research of our data partner, TalkingData, there is a 50,000 shortfall in the supply of Data Scientist in China alone. Hong Kong should not only groom local student and talent but also attract international one to fill up the gap and become the data talent hub in the region. We are glad that there are 250 entry out of 439 are international student including both undergrad and post-grad.

As said, the Hackathon is only a part of “B4B 2017 – Digital Transformation” which is going to be kicked off in Oct 2017 and many events will be arranged until April 2018. You are invited to follow our event page and stay tuned.

Francois Lee

CEO, B4B Limited