External partners
The Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Intensive Science has established links with an inspiring mix of private and public sector organizations.
Our partners have guided our plans for the centre, including the training programme, science projects and long term placements. Our aim is to involve partners for the duration of the PhD programme to foster co-creation and mutually beneficial long-term partnerships.
Our goals are to attract the best young academic talent to data-intensive research, share tools and techniques between science and industry, prepare students for a career in UK industry and build long-term links between UK industry and Big Science.
Our external partners have committed to involvement in all aspects of the centre, including:
- the initial setup of the centre and its on-going management as members of its advisory board
- developing the training programme to ensure it meets industry requirements
- delivering aspects of training, eg through topical guest lectures
- contributions to targeted workshops and skills development activities
- hosting internships and long-term placements for PhD students.
The following industrial partners have indicated their support:
Airbus
Airbus is a world leading aircraft manufacturer. Airbus Group Innovations UK (AGI) is its research branch. The company faces a number of challenges that involve analysis of large amounts of data (eg flight data collected by airplanes) and large-scale simulation (eg flight simulation).
Cray
Cray is a leading vendor of supercomputing systems. The product range includes data intensive workflows, high performance storage, machine learning and data analytics. This portfolio is highly relevant for the challenges faced at the LHC experiments but also future surveys such as SKA, which will allow for a close alignment of the PhD topics with the work undertaken during long-term placements.
DiRAC
DiRAC is STFC’s integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology, consisting of 5 HPC facilities with diverse architectures based at four university locations in the UK, together with dedicated research software engineering effort. A significant component of DiRAC’s role is training younger researchers in effective use of HPC.
EDF Energy
EDF Energy is one of the largest energy companies in the UK. Collecting, analyzing and deriving insight from data is an increasingly important field. The challenges of data collection, storage and interpretation are closely aligned with the activities and expertise of the involved university research groups.
The Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research
The Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research is a national research institute in mathematics and data science and funded by GCHQ. Many of the problems faced by GCHQ are related to data intensive science.
Oracle
Oracle has many business areas relevant to data intensive science and research. These include data management, analytics, big data, data visualisation and data mining and discovery technologies.
STFC Scientific Computing department (SCD)
The STFC SCD provides systems expertise to large-scale scientific projects with extreme demands on computing and networking needs and is developing data intensive storage, handling and analysis systems.
We Predict
We Predict is an SME with offices in Swansea and Detroit employing mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists for data analytics challenges, with particular success in the automotive, manufacturing and health sectors. One of their services is an analytic tool predicting component failure using warranty data.
In addition to the above we have secured support from the Bristol SETsquared Centre, Bristol University’s Business Incubator. The incubator was ranked joint best in the 2015 global UBI ranking and its support will enable us to continue to form links to data intensive SMEs in the South West of England and Wales.