Research areas

Research and Innovation

The Lab’s research emphasis includes:

• Complex networks and data analytics: Data analytics involves getting insights from data by identifying trends and presenting these findings in an easy and simplified way that everyone can understand. Through more complex data analytics we aim to provide not only analysis, but also to develop algorithms and techniques to handle large and interconnected data sets.
• Highly streaming data: Processing data that arrives at high speed from sensors, networks, or log files is a key challenge for modern information systems. As multiple information systems are required to provide a fast response and are often also limited by specific hardware constraints, we aim to design algorithms that efficiently manage these data streams. The group has experience in developing learning methods and real-time recognition from smartphone sensor inputs. Such specialist expertise delivers a crucial advantage in developing applications requiring rapid responses and monitoring.
• Data fusion: Data is stored by organisations with different purposes. This fact forces data to take different formats or levels of detail (specificity), while at the same time often leaving little reusable value or rendering the data incompatible with other organisations. In order to get insights from data among different repositories and formats, the group will focus on seeking novel approaches to unify these sources of information. Academics and current PhD students are investigating methods to handle structured and semi-structured data from social network data, scientific papers and geospatial data.
• Data access: Security and privacy have always been a primary concern for centralised or distributed information systems, and in the era of Big Data this is not going to change. We seek to study how to safely treat information, how to trace the source of data and ensure its integrity (provenance), how to safely preserve data, and how to efficiently query data sources.
• Infrastructure and architectures: Data is distributed in different locations and new technologies are being developed to store and communicate large repositories. We have conducted research in cloud computing so this can directly benefit and complement other research groups at the School of Science.