London Jan. 30 (People's Daily Online)—— A correspondent of People's Daily Online UK interviewed David Gann, the vice president of Imperial College London. He talked about a very hot term 'Big Data' with us in the interview.

Mr. Gann said: "We use the term Big Data quite freely, but actually it’s not always clear what we mean by Big Data. In a scientific institution like Imperial College, there are different scales and degrees of Big Data. If people are working in Genomics and perhaps in High Energy Physics or somewhere, there are truly huge data sets that they’re processing, all the way through to data that’s coming in the financial services which are pretty big, or in city infrastructure. We tend to put our arms around all of that and call it Big Data.

"Actually there’s some interesting things happening, there’s new data which is coming from new censors or new uses of things on the internet, social media and so on. That’s giving us a new calibration point so that we can understand how people are purchasing or what they think is happening in their city.

"We’re trying to understand how that data can be used to provide more evidence for innovation processes and I think that’s an important point that relates to our book because innovation is inherently uncertain. You don’t know until you’ve already developed prototypes and proofs of concept and talked with customers and launched a service or a product and the market, whether it’s going to work.

"Increasingly, we’re trying to be more customised in terms of how we develop services and we’re trying to get feedback more quickly and data is the magic ingredient there and we need to be able to process that data. We need the analytic tools to look at the patterns in that data and that’s why we think that this new data revolution is going to be very important in stimulating different types of innovation.

"I think if in five years’ time, we write a new book, along the lines of the very short introduction, we’ll probably see more about how data and modelling data, being predictive with data, influences the innovation process but that’s something for the future."