The Alan Turing Institute – a joint venture involving the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick, as well as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) – has started operations and named Professor Andrew Blake as its first director.
Prof Blake, currently a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research UK, is expected to start his five year term in October.
Jo Johnson, Minister for Universities and Science, said: "The Alan Turing Institute has set off on a speedy course to secure new lasting partnerships and bring together expertise from across the UK that will help secure our place as a world leader in areas like Big Data, computer science and advanced mathematics."
The Institute is receiving £42million over five years from the UK government, while the university partners are contributing £25m between them. It has also accepted an offer of £10m of research funding from the board of the Lloyd's Register Foundation, intended to recognise the value of data as an asset and to place data at the forefront of engineering design.
A further collaboration with Cray and EPSRC will look to exploit next generation analytics capability on Archer, the UK's largest supercomputer for scientific research.
EPSRC chief executive Prof Philip Nelson said: "We will transform Archer into the largest data analytics platform in the world, enabling huge breakthroughs in leveraging big data into the UK economy and catapulting the UK into a world leader in the data sciences."
Howard Covington, chairman of the Alan Turing Institute, said: "The enthusiasm and commitment of the founding partners have enabled the Institute to make rapid progress. We will now turn to building the Institute's research activities. We are also in discussions with a number of industrial and commercial firms who we expect to become strategic partners in due course and are highly encouraged by the breadth of interest in working with the Institute."
Author
Graham Pitcher
Source: www.newelectronics.co.uk