Big Datais one of the most talked about topics of today across industry, government and research.It is becoming the center ofInvestments, Innovations andImprovization?s (3I's), and no exaggeration to say thatBig Data is Transforming the World. Considering it's potential the IEEE Computer Society is conducting the IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2013, a premier forum to disseminate and exchange the latest and greatest in Big Data. The main theme of the conference will be the5V's: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value and Veracity aspects. The conference will take place in Santa Clara, CA from October 6th to 9th. I have the great privilege to co-chair theIndustry and Government Programwith my distinguished colleagues: Rayid Ghani (Obama Campaign), Wei Han (Noah's Ark Lab) and Ronny Lempel (Yahoo! Labs) along with Xiaohua Tony Hu (Drexel University) who is chairing the Steering Committee. The 4-day program includes about 50 presentations selected from over 300 paper submissions from more than 1000 authors from 40 countries, four keynotes (Amr Awadallah, Mike Franklin, Hector Garcia-Molina and Roger Schell), 12 workshops, and two tutorials. I have the great pleasure to deliver the opening and welcoming speech on behalf of the industry and government committee. I am also chairing Amr Awadallah's keynote session onKey Usage Patterns for Apache Hadoop in the Enterpriseand co-presenting a paper titledA Look at Challenges and Opportunities of Big Data Analytics in Healthcareat the workshop onBig Data in Bioinformatics and Healthcare Informatics. This workshop will be very interesting with sessions likeBig Data Solutions for Predicting Risk