Win-win prospects for big data China-Europe teamwork

China and Europe can find more business potential in big data to create mutual benefits, an industrial insider said.

Despite the yearlong trade frictions between China and United States that have cast a shadow on the global economy, Europe can increase cooperation with China, especially in technological areas, where a win-win situation can be created, according to Luigi Gambardella, president of ChinaEU, a Brussels-based international association promoting digital and internet cooperation.

Such digital connections between China and Europe can be built in sectors including manufacturing, health, tourism and e-commerce, he added.

"Europe's strength lies in core technologies and its traditional vertical sectors such as automation, industrial robotics and other manufacturing, but the datasets on which they can work are greatly dwarfed by those available in China," said Gambardella, during the ongoing China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang, Guizhou province.

Thanks to big data, European companies can have a better understanding of the behaviors and needs of Chinese tourists, so that they can target certain categories of customers and better serve them when they arrive.

Besides, in China, where doctors don't do house calls and hospitals are very full, the use of technology can help people predict illness and meet in real time when they have problems.

The Assistance Publique Hospitals from Paris in Guizhou, for example, adopt big data and machine learning technologies to forecast visit and admission rates for the next 15 days and call on extra staff when high numbers of visitors are expected, leading to reduced wait times for patients and better quality of care.

Europe also benefits from digital links with China through the many e-commerce platforms where they can reap profits from the Chinese market by getting access to Chinese customers in a simple way, according to Gambardella.

Besides, China's large number of data and artificial intelligence-related companies can back many European countries in the digitalization of industries, and that's crucial to save costs and improve efficiency, he said.

Big data was first written into the Government Work Report of China in 2014. Since then, big data has become a hot topic at all levels, such as data sharing, circulation, transaction and security. It has been linked to many areas including agriculture, health, environment and urban development.

To date, the number of Chinese big data professionals has comprised 59.5 percent of the talent in the world. The number of research papers about big data and the citations per paper surpassed the US in 2018, according to a report about the development and analysis of global big data released earlier this month by the Research Center on Fictitious Economy & Data Science under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"I believe that China and Europe's cooperation on big data will be promising and thus, the two sides should jointly build a better global digital community."

He added the focus of China-Europe big data cooperation is not on customers but on business-to-business relations. "Logistics chains, transportation and production can be largely improved by digitalization."