About State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data

State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data

The State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data is a national key laboratory at Guizhou University in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province in southwestern China. It was approved by the Ministry of Science and Technology in September 2021 as a province-ministry co-built state key laboratory, and described by the university as China's first national key laboratory in the big-data field. Its own introduction reports nearly 100 permanent researchers and more than 40 jointly appointed researchers, research equipment worth more than 100 million yuan and 30,000 square metres of research space. It works on the cognition of public-big-data elements, trustworthy and controllable big-data technologies, intelligent applications of public big data and the empowerment of social governance, in support of Guizhou's national big-data comprehensive pilot zone. Since 2021 it reported more than 160 national and provincial projects, more than 500 papers and more than 200 authorised patents and software copyrights.

Approval in 2021: a first in its field

The laboratory's approval by the Ministry of Science and Technology in September 2021 made it, on Guizhou University's account, the first national key laboratory in China dedicated to big data. Its form — a state key laboratory co-built by a province and a ministry — is the mechanism by which national laboratory capacity is planted in a province around a regional strength: the ministry confers the national platform, the province and the university build and sustain it. For Guizhou University, whose history runs back to 1902, the approval was a landmark: the university's own materials list its earlier Provincial Key Laboratory of Public Big Data among the platforms from which it grew, and the 2021 approval raised that provincial platform to national rank. Xinhua photography of the laboratory in operation in May 2022, carried in national reporting on Guizhou's big-data investment, shows it staffed and working within its first year.

What public big data means

The laboratory's subject needs defining, because it is narrower and harder than big data in general. Public big data is the data generated and held in public life and public administration: government service and regulatory data, public-service records, and the data of public resources and public space. Such data has distinctive properties — it is authoritative but fragmented among agencies, valuable but sensitive, and its use engages law, security and public trust as much as computation. A laboratory devoted to it therefore works at the junction of computer science, data governance and public administration. Its task, as its introduction frames it, is to understand public data as an element of production, make its processing trustworthy and controllable, build intelligent applications on it, and put it at the service of social governance — the full chain from data theory to government use.

Research directions

The laboratory's own introduction organises its work under four heads. The first is the cognition of public-big-data elements: the basic science of what public data is, how its value and rights are constituted, and how it can be represented and measured as a factor of production — questions China's data-element market reforms have made urgent. The second is trustworthy and controllable technology: the security, privacy, provenance and control mechanisms that let public data be used without being exposed. The third is intelligent application: the algorithms and systems that turn public data into services and decisions. The fourth is social-governance empowerment: applying all of the above to the work of government and public services. That structure — from element theory through trustworthy technology to governance application — is the laboratory's declared research architecture.

People, space and equipment

On its own published figures, the laboratory is a substantial institution: nearly 100 permanent researchers, more than 40 further researchers jointly appointed with other institutions, research equipment valued at more than 100 million yuan, and 30,000 square metres of research space at Guizhou University. Joint appointment matters in this field, because public-big-data research draws on computer science, mathematics, law, public administration and the domain sciences, and no single department holds them all. The laboratory's scale places it among the larger social-facing computing laboratories in China's national system, and its university setting gives it a direct line to doctoral and master's training in Guizhou's growing computer-science and big-data disciplines — including the university's College of Big Data and Information Engineering.

Output since 2021

The laboratory reports, for the period since its 2021 approval, more than 160 national and provincial research projects undertaken, more than 500 papers published, and more than 200 authorised patents and software copyrights. Software copyrights are a telling part of that tally: a laboratory whose subject is public data in government use produces systems and tools, not only papers, and its intellectual-property record reflects that applied side. Its researchers' publication affiliations also appear in the international literature under both its national name and its predecessor provincial form, the Guizhou Provincial Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, in fields such as natural-language processing — evidence of continuity between the provincial platform and the national laboratory built upon it.

Guizhou: the national big-data pilot zone

The laboratory cannot be understood outside its province. Guizhou, historically one of China's poorer provinces, chose big data as its development bet in the 2010s and became the country's first national big-data comprehensive pilot zone, host of the China International Big Data Industry Expo in Guiyang, and a centre for data centres drawn by its cool climate, energy supplies and policy support; national reporting in 2023 described provincial plans for hundreds of thousands of data-centre racks and millions of servers by 2025, with big data promoted as a mainstay of the province's high-quality development. A national laboratory for public big data in Guiyang is the research crown of that strategy: the province that runs the pilot zone also hosts the laboratory that studies how public data should be governed, secured and used.

An astronomical extension: FAST and the NAO agreement

The laboratory's reach extends to one of Guizhou's other scientific landmarks. In December 2021, Guizhou University and the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences signed a cooperation agreement at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope — FAST, the giant radio telescope in Guizhou's Qiannan prefecture — to cooperate on big-data talent training and scientific and technological innovation and to establish an astronomy big-data laboratory. Provincial reporting of the agreement said the two sides would research new data-storage modes, online processing of FAST's astronomical data, high-stability pulsar timing arrays and optimisation of telescope control systems, and that the university's national public big-data laboratory would increase investment and talent recruitment for astronomy big-data storage equipment and supercomputing. Astronomy is among the most data-intensive of sciences, and the agreement shows the laboratory applying its public-data and large-data expertise to a national facility in its own province.

Guiyang and Guizhou University

Guiyang, the laboratory's city, is Guizhou's capital and the seat of both the provincial government whose data practices the laboratory studies and the university that hosts it. Guizhou University is the province's flagship university, jointly developed by ministry and province, with a comprehensive disciplinary spread that a cross-cutting laboratory needs. The laboratory's 30,000 square metres sit within that university, and its governance-empowerment research has its first test-bed close at hand: Guizhou has been a national pioneer in government-data sharing and opening and in digital-government services, giving the laboratory real systems and real administrative partners for its application research rather than simulations alone.

Trust, control and the data-element agenda

The laboratory's trustworthy-and-controllable direction aligns it with a live national agenda. China has moved to treat data as a factor of production, to build data exchanges — Guiyang's global big-data exchange was an early example — and to legislate data security and personal-information protection. Each of those steps creates technical problems of exactly the laboratory's kind: how to compute on data without copying it, how to prove provenance and authorisation, how to price and meter data use, and how to keep public data's public character while it circulates. A national laboratory whose founding directions name trust and control is positioned, by design, at the technical centre of that agenda, and its Guizhou setting keeps it close to a province implementing the agenda at full scale.

Assessment

The State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data is one of the best-documented laboratories in its cohort: a dated national approval in September 2021, a recognised first-in-field status, a published institutional introduction giving its people, space, equipment, directions and output in figures, photographic record of its operation, and a documented national-facility partnership with the National Astronomical Observatories at FAST. It embodies a province's strategy in a single institution — Guizhou bet on big data, built the pilot zone, and then won the national laboratory that studies the hardest part of the subject: the data the public itself generates, and how to use it well and safely.