2016 has been a good year for BigInsight and SIRIUS, the two data oriented Centres for Innovation-driven Research hosted at the University of Oslo. The annual reports from the centres can be found here:
BigInsight
Fulfilling the promise of the big data revolution, BigInsight produces analytical tools to extract knowledge from complex and big data and deliver BigInsight. Despite extraordinary advances in the collection and processing of information, and the availability of generic software for analytics, much of the potential residing in contemporary data sources remains unexploited. At BigInsight we exploit specific knowledge on the systems we wish to understand or predict, exploit structure and relations between data layers, which allow tailoring analyses with strong power.
There is a dramatic scope for industries, companies and nations – including Norway – to create value from employing novel ways of analysing complex data. The complexity, diversity and dimensionality of the data, and our partner’s innovation objectives, pose fundamentally new challenges to statistical inference. Therefore we have to invent new cutting-edge statistical, mathematical and machine learning methods, and we have to produce high-quality algorithms to implement these approaches.
We are working with generic methodology motivated and adapted to important problems from our partners. Many interesting and important research projects are in very lively phases, and some have delivered already useful results for our partners, for example DNB and Hydro.
SIRIUS
SIRIUS is a Norwegian Centre for Research-driven Innovation that addresses the problems of scalable data access in the oil & gas industry. The centre combines public funding for basic research with funding from its industry partners into an 8 year programme for industrial innovation
The SIRIUS researchers are experts in IT technologies, including high-performance and cloud computing, database technology, semantic technologies and natural language processing. The centre also includes researchers in the area of working practices involving novel technology.
The centre aims to provide the oil & gas business with better ways to access and use the massive amounts of data that are generated in projects and daily operation. Problems with data access are made more acute by the rise of big data, the internet of things and digitalisation of enterprises. SIRIUS approaches these problems using an interdisciplinary approach, as successful innovation depends on the combination of technologies.