Professor Mark Girolami FRSE has been appointed to lead The Alan Turing Institute-Lloyd’s Register Foundation £10 million programme into data-centric engineering.
An internationally leading researcher in statistical sciences, Mark has had a broad career including 10 years as an engineer at IBM. He brings to the programme significant experience of developing and applying advanced statistical and computational techniques to engineering challenges.
As Programme Director, Mark will be responsible for leading the research programme, defining core challenges and working with industry to deploy data-centric engineering techniques to real-world problems.
Mark joins the Institute from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London where he holds a Chair in Statistics. The programme will be located and run at The Alan Turing Institute headquarters in the British Library, with a portion of the funding allocated to a collaboration with Imperial College London, who will second their researchers to work alongside Turing Fellows to support the delivery of the programme’s core activities.
Additional funding will support an intensive programme of collaboration with researchers both in the UK and internationally, with the first open recruitment for researchers in engineering, computer science, mathematics and statistics and industry partners to collaborate on the programme expected in 2017.
Mark says: “With the potential to significantly improve safety, performance and efficiency, data-centric engineering is set to transform how major infrastructure projects and complex machinery are designed, implemented, operated and decommissioned. I am delighted to join the Turing-Lloyd’s Register Foundation team as Programme Director, and I look forward to defining, building, and leading the international programme on data-centric engineering.”
“Data-centric engineering will greatly enhance our ability to understand and improve the safety of engineered systems," says Ruth Boumphrey, the Foundation's Director of Research. "Analytics will create value from a wide range of data, informing not only asset and machine performance but linking these to the physical, economic, social, and human environments in which they sit. The future value of big data will only be realised if there is organisational and cultural change, accompanied by appropriate analytical tools, skills and practices. Such change requires leadership, and we look forward to working with Mark Girolami and The Alan Turing Institute in developing the first generation of ‘data-centric engineers’."
Find out more about data-centric engineering
Our Foresight review of big data gives a useful introduction to data-centric engineering.
How to get involved with the data-centric engineering programme
For more details see the Alan Turing Institute website www.turing.ac.uk/data-centric-engineering/