To react to the drastic developments in Big Data, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE CIS) has taken several measures, including setting up the First IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Big Data, which is going to be held within the SSCI 2014 in December 2014 in Florida, USA, and revising the name of the Technical Committee on Data Mining to expand its scope to cover Big Data Analytics. This special issue of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine is one in a series of reactions of the IEEE CIS to the boom in Big Data Analytics research that aims to publish selected research articles presenting most recent advances and discussing challenges and opportunities in the application of CI techniques to Big Data. After a peer-review procedure, two papers have been selected from 12 manuscripts submitted to the Special Issue to be present in this Special Issue, representing the highest quality work on CI techniques in understanding Big Data challenges. Both papers are briefly summarized. Both papers are of review nature discussing the opportunities and promises of CI techniques along with challenges. They have raised more questions than answers, which is actually the aim of this Special Issue to trigger a wider range of interests in the CI community.