New at St Andrews: Institute for Data-Intensive Research

The St Andrews Institute for Data-Intensive Research (IDIR) is a new institute set up to provide a focus for research and teaching activities across the University driven by access to “big data”. 

IDIR will bring the University’s strengths in humanities and social sciences with those in computer, mathematical, life, and physical scientists to share insights and techniques. IDIR results from the enormous volume of activity taking place across the University that could broadly be described as data-driven – from data science, through digital humanities and digital social science, to digital medicine, which all share common characteristics. They are exploring new techniques and opportunities brought about by the availability of large volumes of data and the processing power needed to manipulate them.

Some of the Schools included are Computer Science, Mathematics & Statistics, Physics & Astronomy, Medicine, Chemistry, Biology, International Relations, Earth and Environmental Sciences and History.

NVIDIA Corporation award for Big Data researchers

NVIDIA Corporation has awarded Dr Blesson Varghese, from Computer Science, two Tesla K40 GPU accelerators worth over £11,000. The Tesla K40 GPUs were launched last month and Blesson’s winning proposal was ‘GPU Acceleration for Real-time Predictive Analytics’ which will be pursued at the Big Data Lab in collaboration with Dr Adam Barker from Computer Science and Prof Peter Donnelly from the School of Medicine.