Recently, big data tsunami has hit our nation, and this phenomenon has awakened the academy communities to aggressively address the hindsight, and ahead challenges to ensure Malaysia will be the leader for big data science, as well as big data analytics. Big data terminology has been introduced implicitly since 1944 by Fremont Rider, who was a Librarian of the Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut where he wrote a book on The Scholar and The Future of the Research Library. In his book, he estimated that libraries in American universities would expand to over 200,000,000 volumes by 2014. Today, Yale Library alone has approximately 12.5 million volumes across 20 buildings on campus.

Later, Claude Shannon, known as the “Father of information,” carried out research on big storage capacity in 1949 on items such as punch cards and photographic data. One of the largest items on Shannon’s list was the Library of Congress, measuring over 100 trillion bits of data. However, the term “Big Data” was used explicitly for the first time when researchers M. Cox and D. Ellsworth (1997) wrote an article identifying that the rise of data was becoming an issue for current computer systems, thus they called it as the “problem of big data.” In a simple word, big data is datasets, which size is beyond the ability of typical database software to store, manage, and analyze together with its three basic personalities: Volume, Velocity, and Variety.  These personalities require new architecture, techniques, algorithms, and analytics to uncover the golden and hidden knowledge from information obesity (infobesity) to generate a new information economy (infonomics). UTM Big Data Centre is established to achieve these objectives; to intersect the core of Big Data Analytics into big data science, big data computing and big data engineering, as well as to provide the right information at the right time, which enables data analysts, data scientist, data engineers or managers to make informed business decisions. Our centre gives the taste of the breadth and depth of data-driven research currently being carried out at UTM Big Data Centre and the Faculty of Computing Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. On behalf of the UTM Big Data Centre, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Faculty of Computing, I thank you for your support, and I am looking forward to working with you to develop big data future for the nation and human wealth creation in the era of new information economy. PM Dr. Siti Zaiton Mohd Hashim Director of UTM Big Data Centre UNIVERSITI TEKNOLOGI MALAYSIA Email: sitizaiton@utm.my Phone:+607-5535060