China’s big data demand needs global talent

The next generation’s top quantitative researchers, data scientists and software engineers are out there, and many companies are competing to find them.

The recently concluded Data Open Championship, which unfolded across the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland in recent months, is headed to China next year, starting with Peking University.

The competition was hosted by Citadel, a $27 billion global hedge fund.

Ken Griffin, Citadel co-founder and CEO, and rivals have turned to unconventional ways to find the brightest data minds at a time of fierce competition from the likes of Facebook and Google.

Citadel hosted 20 one-day competitions from Stanford to MIT to Oxford, with the best performers competing in the weeklong finale, concluded on Nov 27.

“Great investors are like great basketball players,” Griffin told CNBC. “They’re hard to come by.”

“We organized over 20 competitions to help them (Citadel) hire the best data science talent,” said Ivan Fan, head of growth strategy at Correlation One, a talent solution firm that co-hosted the competitions with Citadel and its spinoff company Citadel Securities.

“China is the number one talent market in the world – one third of the college students are Chinese; also, it’s the number one data producer that produces the most information and is also going to be the largest market for AI-based services.

“And finally, China is the biggest gaming market,” said Fan. “Because of these trends, we see China as the future of global data talent market.”

According to a plan released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in January, by 2020, China’s big data industry should increase its annual sales to 1 trillion yuan ($145 billion) and produce 10 world-leading big data companies.

“What’s interesting about these participants this year is that the vast majority are Chinese, and over 60 percent of our top-performing students, basically the top 20-percentile, are Chinese,” said Fan.

This year’s winners were a team from the University of California Berkeley, which included Allen Tang from Nanjing, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and other members from the US and Germany.

“It’s a great opportunity to figure out my own advantages and disadvantages and learn from other team members,” said Tang, who is interested in working in quantitative finance after finishing his master’s degree.

“Big data is a general trend no matter in the US or in China. … I believe there are definitely a great amount of businesses in China now making data-driven decisions,” said Tang. “I think there are definitely a lot of opportunities in China that apply data science to a great amount of challenging problems, from policymaking to personal devices. I believe all students, including myself, are looking for those good opportunities in China.”

“Obviously, China is the largest data talent market, but there is also a huge demand in attracting global talent to China as well as the repatriation of Chinese overseas students,” Fan said.

China has 460,000 professionals working in big data, and there will be about 1.5 million jobs that could go unfilled in the next three to five years, according to a report released by human resources service company Hire Big Data.
“China’s big data market is set to grow a lot more than the data market in the West in the next few years, because from my understanding, China’s adoption and usage of the internet has been a lot wider spread than in the West,” said Austin Tripp of the University of Waterloo in Canada, who also attended the contest.

“Especially considering the development of WeChat, where you have a lot of services in one that provide all kinds of data in one – the greater volume of data and the better resources will help China’s innovation in big data for sure.

“The Chinese market is becoming more and more open, and definitely the market is not only interesting to me, but also to many data scientists in the Canada and the US,” Tripp added.

Bloomberg contributed to this story.

ruinanzhang@chinadailyusa.com