New Driving Forces of Network Science: Big Data and Crowd Sourcing

The era of big data has brought big opportunities to network science, yet the study of network science is also facing big challenges of processing huge amount of data. Meanwhile, a new project outsourcing model, the crowd-sourcing model, has been widely applied recently to solving data related problems. This paper presents a brief introduction to the new driving forces of network science: big data and crowd-sourcing model. We also review the 2013 Alibaba data platform innovation competition as well as our award-winning work. We expect that driven by the crowd-sourcing model, data science, which deals with big data processing techniques, shall evolve together with network science into a prosperous future.