Only five universities have been considered worthy of establishing the prestigious £42m Alan Turing Institute for Data Science. Thanks to our hard-earned reputation for world-class research, Warwick is one of those five.

This means our exceptional researchers from Mathematical Sciences will be at the forefront of the UK’s approach to big data. We’ll help the Institute to meet society’s toughest challenges, and strengthen the links between academia and technology industries.

Using the headquarters at the British Library in London as a base, we’ll use our research strength - as demonstrated by our excellent Research Excellence Framework (REF) performance - to fully exploit the trends and patterns found within huge data sets.

By working alongside the very best, we’ll make the UK a world leader in big data.

What is the big deal about Big Data?

The potential of big data to help identify links between data from the real and online world is immense according to Dr Suzy Moat and Dr Tobias Preis of Warwick Business School. Watch this new film to discover how big data is improving future forecasts of human behaviour:

What does this mean for Warwick?

The Institute will bring together leaders in advanced mathematics and computing science from the five lead universities and other partners. Its work is expected to encompass a wide range of scientific disciplines and be relevant to a wide range of business sectors.

Professor Mark Girolami, Department of Statistics, will lead the initiative at Warwick:

The Alan Turing Institute is a hugely exciting development for the mathematical and statistical sciences in the UK and it will have a massive impact on my own research work. For example the results of recent research of my group now forms the technology that most Automated Teller Machines (ATM) employ in the detection of counterfeit currency.Now with the ability of these machines to obtain even more types of data the possibilities that Big Data presents to provide further services and safeguards to individual users of ATMs is amazing.

But the exploitation of this new so called Big Data requires the development of new cutting edge mathematics and statistical methods to ensure we make the most of these opportunities.The ATI is going to enable my own group to work on these sorts of problems and take theory to algorithms to economically valuable products and services."

The announcement of our involvement in the Alan Turing Institute is undoubtedly good news, but what does it mean for Warwick? Professor Tim Jones, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Science, Engineering and Medicine explains:

It means Warwick is right at the top table in the area of data science. This is the UK’s strategic priority to pull together the best academics and other partners across the country to tackle the challenges of big data and to exploit the opportunities. There are four other universities in the Institute – Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and UCL – and Warwick will be the fifth. I think that’s a great measure for the quality of our work in the area.

Read the full interview with Professor Tim Jones as he explores what this announcement means for Warwick.

Find out more about Big Data?

Big Data is one of the areas where our research excels thanks, in part, to our world leading mathematics, computer science and statistics departments. Warwick has long prized itself on using interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to answer the pressing questions of our time, and, as big data throws up such questions, that expertise comes to the fore.

Interested in learning more about Big Data? You can sign up for a free MOOC course on Big Data starting in April.

Find out more about what Big Data means at Warwick

Read the full media release

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