The 2017 China National Conference on Big Data and Social Computing (BDSC2017) concluded on Aug 13 in Lanzhou.  The 2-day conference was co-organized by School of Computer Science at Northwestern Normal University, School of Information Science at Renmin University of China, and Centre for Communication Research (CCR) and Web Mining lab at City University of Hong Kong.  Over 100 scholars and students from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U. S., and elsewhere attended.  A wider range of invited speeches and papers were presented, involving not only computer science but also various disciplines of social sciences and humanities.

Jonathan Zhu of CCR/Web Mining Lab served a co-chair of the conference.  In the opening session, he gave a keynote speech on the origin, evolution and future directions of computational social science.

Given the popularity of the conference series, the newly formed Steering Committee, of which Jonathan Zhu is a vice chair, has decided to hold the conference once every year from now on.  BDSC2018 will be hosted by Tianjin University in Tianjin around late June 2018.  Call for papers will be issued in due time.