Zhang Qian, Liu Shiyang

    zhqcindy@163.com

    The Conference on International Finance and the International Workshop on Mathematical Issues in Information Sciences (MIIS) were held at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, CUHK(SZ), last weekend, with global and frontier issues discussed by experts and specialists.

    The finance conference was co-sponsored by CUHK(SZ), Shenzhen Finance Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, aiming to gather outstanding researchers, policy makers and financial practitioners from financial communities home and abroad.

    The discussion covered a wide range of topics, concerning housing prices, exchange rate of the RMB, international trade, FDI and the like.

    Two keynote speakers delivered speeches at the conference. Charles Engel, editor of the Journal of International Economics, pointed out that the most important challenges in the field of international finance included exchange rate models, international asset pricing and how to construct a macromodel of the new open economy.

    Tao Zhang, deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, emphasized the importance of keeping sustainable development while maintaining steady economic growth, which could be achieved by insisting on rules of globality, sustainability and cooperation.

    The conference also highlighted that Shenzhen and China as a nation are both encountering challenges and opportunities in the process of globalization. Huang Yi from the Graduate Institute Geneva talked about the relationship between public debt and private enterprise capital in Chinese cities as supporting examples to this idea.

    Another conference, MIIS, regarding information science issues like big data, was also held on the campus of CUHK(SZ), lasting for four days from Dec. 17 to 20.

    The conference invited many experts to make keynote speeches, such as Alfred Hero from the University of Michigan, who spoke on continuum limits, and David Tse from Stanford University, who shed light on DNA and RNA assembly in information sciences.

    One of the co-sponsors of this conference, Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, was established in March this year under the support of the Shenzhen government and academic resources of CUHK(SZ). The institute consists of world-famous data scientists, amounting to 35 members in the team so far.

    The institute mainly focuses on the disposal and application of data, with three development directions: precision medicine through analyzing data, communication and network resource allocation as well as selecting useful data to help with governmental decisions.