The Data-Driven Innovation hubs
The Data-Driven Innovation initiative has helped establish - and exists to support - six data-driven innovation ‘hubs’, which house expertise and facilities to help 10 industrial sectors become more innovative through data.
Opened in October 2018, the Bayes Centre provides an innovative environment to support the co-location of up to 600 world-leading applied data science researchers, students, and collaborating staff from organisations across the public, private and third sectors. The Centre is also home to the Post-Covid AI Accelerator, the Data Science Technology and Innovation online PGT programme and coordinates the internationally acclaimed EIE programme.
Focussing on the facilitation of translational research and development, the Bayes Centre connects industry partners to academic and research expertise from across the institution, as well as organisations like the Alan Turing Institute and the Data Lab.
The National Robotarium is co-located on the Heriot-Watt University campus, having access to the resources of both Heriot-Watt and the University of Edinburgh. It meets existing and future industrial need by accelerating the generation of knowledge and flow of technologies into the economy through targeted research, industry collaboration, living laboratories, demonstrator and incubation facilities.
The National Robotarium provides leading-edge facilities to co‐locate researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs and educators to deliver the UK’s leading international centre for the generation of new, smart robotics companies.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)
The EFI is a global centre for multi-disciplinary, challenge-based DDI research, teaching and societal impact. The biggest challenges that the world faces are complex and interconnected. Solving them requires multiple orientations and understandings.
EFI’s approach brings the arts, humanities and the social sciences into contiguity with data science, natural sciences and with medicine – to co-create deeply interdisciplinary models. The first major programme is focused on the challenges and opportunities posed by the revolution in data, digital and artificial intelligence.
EFI is helping to transform the application, governance and benefits delivered from the use of data. It does this by bringing together a range of academic disciplines, third party organisations, and sectors including financial services, cultural industries and the public sector, that are dealing directly with these challenges.
Through the application of data science, the Usher Institute aims to develop innovative and financially sustainable models of health and social care that improve lives.
Located at Edinburgh BioQuarter, the Institute is a world-leading hub where up to 600 health and social care researchers and scientists collaborate with colleagues from public, private and third sectors organisations to deliver data-driven advances. The Institute drives health and social care innovation at scale by integrating the activities of: clinicians, life scientists and data scientists to identify new, co-produced insights in identified areas of challenge; and industry and public sector organisations to extract, apply and commercialise expert knowledge.
The Institute draws on Scotland’s mature and world-leading health data assets, and well-established governance and data-sharing protocols developed in partnership with the National Health Service and the Scottish Government.
An efficient agricultural sector is critical to social wellbeing; by 2050, global agricultural production will need to increase by 50% to feed a growing global population. By applying data technologies that enable farmers and related industries to improve food production, veterinary care, digital agriculture (Agritech) is critical to increasing global food supply.
The Easter Bush Agritech Hub leverages existing world-class research institutes and commercialisation facilities to help the City Region become a global location of Agritech and veterinary excellence. It does this through the deployment of a campus-wide network that generates and collates, in real time, a multitude of local and global data, (e.g. veterinary activities, animal genetics, food species genetics, soil condition, weather and market drivers).
It also works with commercial collaboration partners to use this information to realise the potential of having the right food species, and the right products, in the right field at the right time to maximise agricultural productivity.
EIDF (Edinburgh International Data Facility)
The Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF) provides the enabling data infrastructure platform for the wider DDI initiative and its hubs. The DDI activities require an extremely powerful, high capacity and flexible infrastructure, capable of responsive delivery of an expanding range of complex and bespoke data and analytical services.
By leveraging prior investments in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), and its Advanced Computing Facility (ACF), the EIDF represents a practical, flexible and cost-effective approach to the delivery of diverse technological requirements.