In August 2017, Professor James Allan gave a lecture, "Extracting Knowledge from Big Data - Information Retrieval," for the Hokkaido Summer Institute (HSI) course held at Hokkaido University's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology (IST). The HSI course, “Introduction to Big Data and Cybersecurity for Graduate Students,” was organized by Hokkaido's IST and their Global Station for Big Data and Cybersecurity (GSB), Global Institution for Research and Education (GI-CoRE).
According to Hokkaido, the "GSB was launched in April 2016 as an interdisciplinary research hub to cover big data, information network, and cybersecurity promoting international collaborative research with the University of Massachusetts Amherst."