Background

As the amount of data collected and generated continues to skyrocket, so do the challenges for effective analysis across a growing range of application areas. Such Big Data analysis now drives nearly every aspect of society, including life and physical sciences, retail, manufacturing, financial services. But with increasing data volumes and an ability to measure and store data on a scale never before seen, comes a number of challenges. New approaches in collection, processing, storage and analysis are required in order to derive new knowledge and deliver benefits from this unprecedented access to information.

The need for statistically robust techniques and methodologies to effectively deal with large datasets is ever increasing, particularly in relation to identifying and banishing spurious correlations. Data analytics, particularly in areas such as metagenomics, also require extensive computational power, presenting a whole other set of challenges.

Objectives

This Turing Gateway to Mathematics half day workshop took place on day one of the 1st UCL Workshop on the Theory of Big Data. It brought together leading expertise in the areas of Big Data methodology, analytics and computation and provided an insight into the latest approaches and techniques needed to cope with this rapidly developing and important area.

Specifically, methods for querying and mining Big Data are fundamentally different from traditional statistical analysis on small samples. Big Data is often noisy, dynamic, heterogeneous, inter-related and untrustworthy and analysis can be hindered by computational limitations. Added to this the fact that as with many IT-based trends, the data-driven world comes with its own set of jargon, the whole landscape can present a confusing picture for end users as well as researchers. This workshop provided an insight into the core mathematical and computational issues and challenges, from a practice and applications perspective. The event was of interest to individuals from multiple industry, public and academic backgrounds.

Registration and Venue

The workshop took take place at University College London, Gower Street, London. Please see the link for further information about the venue.