Improving the monitoring of hospital patients in intensive care units by harnessing the power of "big data" is just one example of the work that a new data sciences research centre in Edinburgh will be investigating when it officially opens its doors tomorrow.
The intended groundbreaking work will be carried out at the new £10.6 million Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics, which will bring together experts from areas such as machine learning, statistics, databases, algorithms, natural-language processing and computer vision.
The new centre - which is expected to become Scotland's main hub for academic research into big data - has benefited from £4.7m in funding from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council which will, over the next five years, allow around 10 students each year to embark on doctoral studies. The first batch of 11 students started in September.
A further £5.3m of cash and in-kind support for the centre comes from the University of Edinburgh and 34 external partners which include Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, Apple and Xerox.
Other partners which will collaborate with the new centre include HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, JP Morgan, Skyscanner and Brightsolid Online Technology Ltd.
The new centre's director, Professor Chris Williams, said that he expected huge demand for data scientists over the next decade and that the centre "is designed to address this need, training a new generation of researchers to become leaders in this emerging area". Williams added: "Data science has the potential to transform the way we work, across areas as diverse as the fundamental sciences to applications in industry and the public sector."
He said that the facility would help to spawn commercial spin-offs across a wide range of high-growth sectors.
Establishing Edinburgh as a centre of excellence for data science in Scotland would also encourage high-level students and researchers in the field from around the world to come to the capital.
The new research centre will be housed in the same building as the Edinburgh hub of a new national data innovation centre, which launched on Thursday last week.
The Data Lab, which will also have hubs in Glasgow and Aberdeen, is designed to help Scotland exploit the commercial potential of data analytics, particularly in the fields of digital technology, energy and utilities, financial services, healthcare and public-services sectors.
The Data Lab has been backed with £11.3m of public funds and will bring together businesses, academia and the public sector. It aims to encourage companies and organisations to make effective use of data and help provide them with insights that will allow them to improve productivity and competitiveness.
Growth of data through technological advance in recent years means companies are exposed to more information than ever before.
As a result, the field of data analytics has become one of the fastest-emerging disciplines in computer science and aims to extract actionable knowledge and help identify meaningful patterns from the vast streams of unstructured data that are now being created in almost every sphere of human activity from molecular biology, commerce and social media to sustainable energy, healthcare and the public sector.
The London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates that the big data marketplace could, in the coming years, see 58,000 jobs created within the UK alone and, in the six years to 2017, will benefit the national economy by £216 billion.
The potential benefit to Scottish companies - most of them small to medium-sized companies - is assessed at £17bn by consultancy firm, Optimat.
The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that, by 2025, a dozen new technologies, many underpinned by big data, will have the potential to boost the world's economy by between $14 trillion (£9tn) and $33tn (£21tn) per year.
A study published last week by the data storage firm EMC found that Scottish firms are better equipped to exploit the commercial opportunities of big data than companies in the rest of the UK.
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