Division of Fundamental Research (DFR), launched in April 2019, is aiming at investigating and resolving the fundamental scientific problems arising from data science and engineering, and in the meantime provide mathematical and technological support to the demand for fast development of the Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, situated at the vibrant city of Shenzhen. Since its establishment, the DFR has experienced significant development and attracted many talented research scientists worldwide to work. Their working areas include mathematical optimization, stochastic programming, sparsity and manifold optimization, machine learning, data mining, statistical modeling, tensor models, and signal processing. Successful applications of the theory and algorithms developed by the DFR researchers have been found in numerous practical fields such as signal and image processing, pattern analysis, computer visions, wireless communications, natural language processing, recommendation system, medical diagnosis, operations and financial management. The DFR continues its rapid growth to bring a huge impact through its cutting-edge research in diverse areas of data sciences.
The main research areas at the current stage of development of DFR are mainly focused on three aspects: to develop a methodology for collecting data efficiently and correctly and with privacy protection; to investigate novel theories, models, and algorithms as well as an implementation platform for non-structural big data; to develop a new generation of mathematical optimization theory and high-performance algorithms for big-data problems arising from science and engineering.