Welcome

The era of Big Data is already here, it isn’t going away and is likely to become a lot more challenging. The volume, detail, availability and distribution of enterprise and scientific data is growing at an exponential rate and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Unlocking the power of Big Data represents an unprecedented opportunity for competitive advantage. Analysing distributed data sets and turning data into information is a key driver for industrial competition, growth and scientific innovation.

With the advent of cloud computing, resizable infrastructure for large-scale data analysis is now available to everyone. However, writing scalable applications and algorithms that run on top of cloud infrastructure is an extremely demanding task. Engineers still have no off-the shelf solutions that they can readily use to manage, move and analyse distributed data sets. In order to unlock the potential of Big Data we need to overcome a significant number of research challenges including: managing diverse sources of data with no common schema, mobile code architectures, removing the complexity of writing auto-scaling algorithms, real time analytics, suitable visualisation techniques for Petabyte scale data sets etc.

The Big Data Lab's mission is to support the architecture and engineering of scalable systems that address current and future Big Data challenges evident in both enterprise and scientific environments. Our data-intensive research agenda is pursued by modelling, evaluating and building novel architectures and algorithms based on sound computer science theory. Much of our work follows a multi-disciplinary approach; we work on real world problems at the intersection of Science, Engineering, Finance, and Computer Science. The tag cloud captures some of the Big Data Lab’s core ideals and current projects.