Prof. Jonathan Zhu has been appointed by China Computer Federation (CCF) an overseas member of the newly formed Task Force on Big Data ( TFBD,  http://www.ccf.org.cn/sites/ccf/xhdtnry.jsp?contentId=2695711538901 ).  Among the 70 members, 44 are from universities in mainland China, 16 from industry, and 10 from overseas including 4 from Hong Kong.  The body aims to explore ways to promote interdisciplinary collaboration, university-industry partnership, open source/data practice, and other emerging issues in big data research.

As a social scientist engaged in long-term collaboration with information scientists, Prof. Zhu has participated in several platforms related to interdisciplinary research in the age of big data.  He served a respondent in a keynote speech by director of Microsoft search engine in the annual conference of International Communication Association (http://www.icahdq.org/conf/2012/infusing.asp) in May, a participant in the 424^th Xiangshan Science Conference on Web Data Science (http://www.xssc.ac.cn/xs/showconf.asp?tid=4&pid=301) in April, and will serve a co-general chair of the Fourth CCF China National Conference on Social Computing (http://idke.ruc.edu.cn/ncsc2012/officer.html) in the coming November.