“More than 100 research staff – ranging from computer scientists and engineers, and experts in machine learning, to statisticians, mathematicians and social scientists – will soon begin work at The Alan Turing Institute with the mission to advance the world-changing potential of data science,” said Andrew Blake, the Institute’s Director.
“Azure cloud services will provide our data scientists with an easily accessible platform where they can prototype ideas with a fast turnaround of results, complementing local computing facilities available in the Institute’s five founding universities, and national resources such as the supercomputer ARCHER supported by EPSRC,” Blake added. “We are delighted that Microsoft is enabling access to Azure cloud services, and supporting this crucial element of our research infrastructure.” Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President of the Data Group at Microsoft, commented, “We are proud to be working closely with the Alan Turing Institute to show how AI, machine learning and data science can be applied in novel ways to real-world problems. We are excited to be enabling researchers to do their best work by providing access to the state-of-the-art capabilities in Microsoft Azure.”
Jeannette M. Wing, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, added: “The Alan Turing Institute is a unique place where researchers from the U.K.’s top universities come together to push the boundaries of data science. This partnership with the Alan Turing Institute is a prime example of how Microsoft is investing in the global data science research ecosystem, and we look forward to seeing the results of this collaboration.”
Research at The Alan Turing Institute will range from challenges in financial services and smart cities to engineering and security, drawing on mathematical representations, inference and learning, systems and platforms, and data-driven methods for the social sciences for understanding human behavior.
Chris Russell, a Research Fellow in computer vision and machine learning at The Alan Turing Institute, explained the benefits of using the cloud for his research.
“Cloud computing is useful in data science research because we often spend a lot of time thinking and coding, and then we have a short window where we want to use a lot of computation power to immediately test our ideas, before we go back to thinking again,” Russell said.
“One area of my research is how I can produce vivid and lifelike 3D models from simple camera footage. Even though the code I produce is fast enough to run on a home laptop, in order to get the best 3D reconstructions on a wide range of videos I may need to rerun the code hundreds of thousands of times,” Russell added. “This kind of fluctuating need for computation is a great match for the cloud which lets me run these large-scale experiments in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.”
