I will talk about joint work with Raymond Heitmann that gives a construction of big Cohen-Macaulay algebra in mixed characteristics following the recent breakthroughs on the direct summand conjecture by Andr\'{e} and Bhatt. In fact, we prove a weakly functorial version for certain surjective ring homomorphism that leads to the solution of the vanishing conjecture for maps of Tor in mixed characteristic. Our work also gives a simplified proof of the direct summand conjecture, and that direct summand of regular rings are Cohen-Macaulay.