Data partnership seeks to benefit public sector
The University’s Bayes Centre for Data Science and Technology has agreed a memorandum of understanding with SAS, a leader in analytics.
The partners’ three-year collaboration, under which SAS will establish a lab in the Bayes Centre, will focus on data-driven innovation in the public sector.
Better services
Working with many partner organisations, the team’s initial focus will be delivering better public services through the use of big data – drawing meaningful insights from vast amounts of information.
Data science and technology enable data flow to be captured quickly, identifying trends and behaviours across many sectors and leading to improved services for people.
SAS has been a strong supporter of Scotland’s innovation ecosystem for several years. The organisation opened a research and development centre in Glasgow in 2013 and helped to launch The Data Lab innovation centre in Edinburgh in 2014.
We are delighted to begin this new collaboration in the Bayes Centre with SAS to deliver new strategic research initiatives alongside shorter-term projects that will deliver value to our public-sector partners.
SAS has a long history of working with universities around the world and I’m excited to be able to offer the prestigious University of Edinburgh the SAS Platform and its latest SAS Viya capabilities. I look forward to hearing how SAS, and our technology, can help solve problems that will benefit the people and economy of Scotland, a country I always enjoy visiting.
The Bayes Centre offers a unique opportunity for us to support the ambition of Edinburgh becoming the data capital of Europe. Delivering data driven innovation requires many different forms of collaboration and this aligns well to SAS as we operate across the entire analytics life cycle – from data, to discovery, to deployment. Our new platform is able to interoperate with popular open-source languages to provide a streamlined environment that will foster productivity, agility and tangible results.
The initiative anticipates finalisation of the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal which aims to establish Scotland as the data capital of Europe, with benefits shared widely.