On April 9th,the Second Session of International Commercial Data Forum was held at the school of management of University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) with outstanding business researchers from several top universities gathering to discuss their progress in data-driven business research heatedly. Several professors from the US and the National University of Singapore (NUS) attended the opening ceremony and shared interesting ideas, originating from business practices and data of companies like, DiDi, federated locker system in Singapore, HuiLiu Tea and so on.

Prof. YU Yugang, opened the discussion by exemplifying internet-based supply chain with the operation practice and data from HuiLiu Tea and Goldfarm. The application of the Internet has brought revolution to the management of the supply chain. Comparing with the traditional ones, the Internet-based supply chain is more flat and is more like a platform. Many interactions where merchants used to talk face to face can now be conducted online, this greatly reduces the cost of trading.A lot of data was referred in supporting these ideas. Prof. Christopher S. Tang from the National University of Singapore (NUS) proposed the data of fare and waiting time of a taxi software. Prof. WEI Kwok Kee analyzed the prosperity of China Mobile Payment and Prof. Chung Piaw Teo showed the data of the state locker of Singapore to try to find out better solutions for site selctionlocation. Prof. WEI Jiuchang referred to news reports of several corporations and their business value to indicate that well-known and well-liked differs a lot when a crisis happens to a firm.

Later on, the corporation delegates had a discussion with the scholars, hoping that the Forum could build up a good platform for data analysis and thus make more profit. In the future, the massive application of big data and artificial intelligence will bring both opportunities and challenges. So far the cooperation of the ‘NUS-USTC Commercial Data Center’ program has been going on well, and hopefully this program will help promote the Commercial Data Forum to become a top-grade platform for analyzing and communicating commercial data.

LIU YU,USTC  News Center, School of Management Sciences