Alan Turing Institute to be created

Alan Turing

Alan Turing

The chancellor announced in his Budget speech on Wednesday that an institute would be created and named after computer pioneer and code-breaker Alan Turing.

The Institute will focus on new ways of collecting, organising and analysing large sets of data; also known as big data.

The government will provide £42m over five years for the project.

Big Data is the term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using existing database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization of data. The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions.”

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26651179 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Data for more information.

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