Industrial Data Analysis Service

The goal of this project funded by The Danish Industry Foundation is to transfer state-of-the-art Big Data knowledge and technology to Danish industry and to identify and resolve key barriers/obstacles that Danish industry faces in adopting Big Data methods. We will establish an Industrial Data Analysis Service (IDAS) centered at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (DIKU), which will create, gather, and disseminate knowledge on large-scale data analysis, serving the Danish industry and strengthening Danish research and education in Big Data science.

Working with Big Data requires expertise in such diverse technical areas as storage, communication, computation, machine learning and statistics, as well as data security and privacy. Almost no small company and only very few big companies can manage to follow the rapid development of these fields.  The IDAS will bring together top experts and young researchers (S. Alstrup, I. Cox, F. Henglein, C. Igel, C. Lioma, M. Nielsen, C. E. Oancea, M. Vaz Salles, Y. Seldin) in the above areas, who can collectively handle all challenges posed by large-scale data analysis. Foremost, they will provide a consultancy service that will satisfy the immediate needs of the industry for expertise in Big Data analysis. The consultancy service will offer a “single point of contact to the Big Data world” for industry partners (see figure above) and connect them with IDAS experts in the relevant fields. The experts will help evaluating the business potential of applying data analysis in a company and will help solve the industrial challenges through consultancy advice, pilot/feasibility studies, third-party IT companies associated with IDAS, and/or joint research projects. This service will improve the industrial partner’s value chains and strengthen the partners’ international competitiveness.

By bringing together leading researchers and challenging real-world Big Data applications, new cutting-edge approaches and solutions to Big Data problems will emerge, and subsequently disseminated through scientific publications. The IDAS will satisfy the long-term needs of the market for Big Data analysis specialists through educational and training programmes. These will include workshops and courses for company employees as well as real-world data analysis projects for computer science students.

The support by The Danish Industry Foundation will be used as start-up funding for the IDAS. We envision that the IDAS will become a nationally recognized institution within Denmark, serving Danish industry well beyond the three year funding period.