Glasgow Big Data Event held on 21st September

Friday 22nd September, 2017

The first half of the most recent Big Data Network’s event was held on Thursday 21st September, in the Senate Room within the University of Glasgow. Aimed at bringing together researchers from different backgrounds working with big data and/or big models, the event was open to all four Colleges within the University – with speakers from the School of Humanities, the Institute of Molecular Cell and Systems Biology, the School of Education, the School of Engineering, the Institute of Infection, Immunity and Inflammation and the School of Social and Political Sciences. The goal of the day was two-fold:

  1. To have short (10 minute) talks motivating the various problems/goals faced by the various research areas. Following each of these was an across the floor discussion, where audience members asked questions, to better understand the issues themselves, and offered suggestions for potential methods of data analysis.

  2. To identify collaborators for the upcoming second half of the event (a day where those collecting the data work together with data scientists to answer a specific question of interest) and for future projects.

The participants commented that they found the discussions stimulating and were looking forward to the second half of the event. This second half is currently being organised and details will be available and circulated around the School soon. Please do come along and take part, even if you did not attend the first half. Possible application areas (to be confirmed) could include:

  • time series analysis e.g. weather/climate data, the effects of the movements of people during war

  • metabolomics e.g. how mesenchymal stem cells interact with nanoscale shapes/fibres/vibrations

  • spatial modelling e.g. variation with respect to education level, house price data

  • medical diagnostics e.g. how to correctly classify latent Tuberculosis,

  • cellular imaging e.g. cell clustering and migration

  • dna/rna sequencing e.g. gene expression, phenotype-genotype association

Depending on turnout and reaction, this might become a periodic event, so please do come and see what you think!