Big Datais one of the most talked about topics of today across industry, government and research.It has become the center of3I's(Investments, Innovations andImprovization?s), and is expected to power theNext Industrial Revolution. Considering its tremendous potential the IEEE Computer Society is conducting the second IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2014, a forum to disseminate and exchange the latest and greatest in research, development, and applications. The main theme of the conference will be the5V's(Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value and Veracity), data science foundations, infrastructure and management innovations, and  privacy and security. The conference will take place in Washington DC from October 27th to 30th. I have the great privilege to co-chair the conference along with my distinguished colleagues: Xiaohua Tony Hu (Drexel University), Wo Chang (NIST), Charu Aggarwal (IBM), Nick Cercone (York University) and Vasant Honavar (Penn State University). I am also participating on a panel titledBig Data: Challenges, Practices and Technologiesorganized by the NISTwith Jim Wang  (Tsinghua University), Orit Levin (Microsoft) and Geoffrey Fox (NIST); and presenting a paper onBig Data in Genomicsat the 2nd International Workshop on Big Data in Bioinformatics and Healthcare Informatics collocated with the conference.