Data-Driven Research Hub for ICL

A Data Science Institute which will cultivate multidisciplinary collaborations between academic experts and research partners to create the next generation of big data technologies,is set to open at Imperial College London this year.

Work in the new Institute will underpin major developments across the College’s research, in areas including healthcare, financial services and city infrastructure. It will foster the next generation of data researchers and engineers by developing a range of postgraduate and executive courses.

Professor Yike Guo, Director of the Data Science Institute from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, said: “Data is the new natural resource of the twenty first century. If we harness it effectively, it could drive innovation and improve our daily lives in many significant ways.

“Healthcare is an obvious area, with the increasing amount of information available from hospital records, molecular profiling technologies and body sensors. This data can be used to simultaneously analyse cause of disease and effectiveness of treatment for individual patients. Systems to feed this information back to hospitals, GPs and pharmaceutical companies, will improve personalised therapies, providing better diagnoses and treatments. One of our missions is to turn such ideas into reality.” 

Data science deals with collecting, processing, managing, analysing, interpreting and visualising the large and complex datasets that are becoming commonplace in modern research. Imperial’s Data Science Institute will build on the College’s critical mass of multi-disciplinary expertise, including visual analytics, cloud computing, data mining and management.