Abstract: The availability of multi-source data in big data era can potentially lead to a revolution in ride sharing, which has been widely studied in academia as a means of reducing the number of cars, congestion, and pollution by sharing empty seats, and is lack of popularity in practice due to the inflexibility of off-line booking, limited resources and so on. In big data era, dynamic ride sharing, powered by mobile computation, location based service, and social networks, emerges and gains popularities recently for providing real-time and flexible ride sharing services through real-time travel planning systems. These systems raise research opportunities as well as challenges, including how to process real-time location data and traffic data, to match ride requests and cars in real time, and to provide fair, secure, and low-priced services to gain more participants. This paper defines the problem of dynamic ride sharing formally and discusses its variants and recent developments. The framework of filter and refine to solve the real-time challenges of matching requests and cars is then discussed. In particular, in the filter step, we introduce the method of pre-computing, spatio-temporal index, grouping, and parallelizing. In the refine step, we introduce the method of lazy calculation strategy, new index tree structure, and evolutionary computation. We also discuss the techniques related to social factors such as pricing strategies, credit system, human-computer interaction, and security in big data era. Finally, this paper ends with a panoramic summary and a discussion on possible future research directions.