Introduction
Earlier this year we were delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Mark Girolami to lead The Alan Turing Institute and Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s £10 million programme in data-centric engineering.
The programme sets out to apply data-driven techniques to major engineering challenges, generating new research and working with industry to apply this research to real-world problems. Over the past few weeks we have welcomed a new team of researchers to the programme as Group Leaders: Catalina Vallejos, Chris Oates, Din-Houn Lau, Franz Kiraly, Ricardo Silva, Sebastian Vollmer and Weisi Guo.
Catalina is a Bayesian statistician and Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Before joining the Turing, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher on statistical genomics at the MRC Biostatistics Unit and the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute.
Chris is currently a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical & Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS) at the University of Technology at Sydney and was awarded the Biennial Research Prize of the Royal Statistical Society for 2016-2017, shared with Turing Faculty Fellow Rajen Shah.
Din-Houn is a Lecturer in Statistics at Imperial College London. His research interests lie in developing new statistical methods that are efficient, self-monitoring and autonomous in streaming data settings.
Franz is a Lecturer at UCL and Faculty Fellow at the Turing. He is a statistician and machine learner interested in creating a data analytics workflow which is empirically solid, quantitative, and useful in the real world, with a focus on predictive modelling.
Ricardo is a lecturer at UCL at the Department of Statistical Science and Faculty Fellow at the Turing. As part of his research interests, he works on large scale probabilistic models and what they can reveal about the structure of a complex system.
Sebastian is Associate Professor at the Mathematics Institute, University of Warwick, and Faculty Fellow at the Turing working on computational statistics and applied probability. He is leading the Data Study Groups which bridge the gap between academia and the industry – these have been so successful that three more study groups will take place this year.
Weisi is Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick and Faculty Fellow at the Turing. His research areas range from connected interacting cities to telecommunication to the Internet of Nano Things.
The Group Leaders bring to the programme strong experience of working with industry to apply their research to real-world problems. An example of this in action is a current EPSRC-funded project being run by Ricardo Silva and a team from UCL and Harvard University to analyse the structure of passenger movement in the London Underground. Through data analysis, the researchers are building software that learns from past events how passengers adapt when a disruption occurs.
The application will enable transport authorities to understand the resilience of the system, different combinations of location and time of a disruption, and how different communication strategies may inform users of better travel adjustments. The software application will thus provide an important contribution in making a large and complex city transport network more efficient.
In addition
to Ricardo’s collaboration with Transport for London, Catalina is developing a project with Siemens; Chris is working with the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI); Din-Houn is collaborating with Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction in Cambridge; Franz is working with Shell; Sebastian has developed applications for National Grid; and Weisi is developing multiple projects related to Internet-of-Nano-Things and Data-Driven Wireless Networks with telecommunications vendors.
Commenting on the new team, Mark Girolami, Programme Director, said:
“The Lloyds Register Foundation and The Alan Turing Institute have embarked on an ambitious programme of research, translation, and education in the emerging area of Data-Centric Engineering. We are currently working with several companies, national laboratories and government bodies to define a suite of interconnected projects, and we are expecting to see growth of the Programme by bringing in many more projects, partners and people in the next eighteen months. Our team of Group Leaders will be key to us achieving our goals. They bring an impressive range of experience and expertise to the programme and I look forward to working with them as our activities develop.”
Get involved
We are keen to engage with both industry and partners with challenges whose solution is reliant on data-centric engineering, as well as researchers working internationally on the development of new ideas. If you would like to be involved please contact:
Darren Grey
Programme Manager
[email protected]
+44 (0)203 862 3309
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