Collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute

The Alan Turing Institute (ATI) is the United Kingdom’s national centre for data science. SIRIUS participates in the ATI through the University of Oxford’s partnership in the centre and through direct participation of SIRIUS researchers in the centre. In 2018 two SIRIUS researchers, Ernesto Jimenez-Ruíz and Evgenij Thorstensen have been visiting fellows at ATI.

Ernesto started at the ATI in April 2018, working in the Artificial Intelligence for Data Analytics (AIDA) project. Data analytics is the process of transforming a raw dataset into useful knowledge. By drawing on new advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, this project is aiming to develop systems that will help to automate the data analytics process. Data analytics comprises many different stages and phases. While some elements of the data analytics process have benefited from considerable development through software or tools, there has been little methodological research into so-called data ‘wrangling’, even though this is often laborious and time-consuming, and accounts for up to 80% of a typical data science project. AIDA aims to fill this gap. Data wrangling includes understanding what data is available, integrating data from multiple sources, identifying missing, messy or anomalous data, and extracting features in order to prepare data for computer modelling.

Ernesto attended the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Monterrey (California) where he presented a poster and a workshop paper. He also co-organised the Ontology Matching workshop and the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, both collocated with ISWC. He is also supervising Erik Bryhn Myklebust, the PhD student in the Environmental Applications beacon. Erik plans to visit the Alan Turing Institute from March to May 2019.