To make information technology easily adaptable to people’s needs, an individual must connect up the data. (Photo : Reuters)
A human-centric solution to help today’s population deal with information overload has been developed by a couple of engineering experts from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, the Global Times reported.
It's simple: to make information technology easily adaptable to people's needs, an individual must "connect up the data."
"By establishing new association of a great amount of knowledge, we can generate a lot of new knowledge," said Pan Yunhe, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
One example is the digitalized version of the Chinese classic novel, "A Dream in Red Mansions," which included detailed descriptions of food and the life 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," Pan said.
Pan's idea has not only been applied to literature, but to other areas such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The Chinese Academy of Engineering is currently in the process of digitizing herbal information to connect with modern pharmacologic data as well as 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."
Turing Award winner Raj Reddy, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, wholly agreed with Pan's sentiments.
"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," said Raj.
Digitalized knowledge is gaining traction among experts around the globe as over 400 academicians, scholars and experts attended an international symposium hosted by the Chinese Academy of Engineering on Tuesday, Nov. 17.
Experts are optimistic that big data will aid the development of tomorrow's intelligent cities.
