Data Science

Theme Lead: Professor Magnus Rattray

Data Science or Data Analytics is about the processes involved in extracting meaning from the abundance of data that are now available. It is a cross-disciplinary field that offers many opportunities for researchers across the university.

Data Science Institute

The University of Manchester's Data Science Institute was created to act as an access point to the University's expertise in data science and AI, bringing together researchers and exploring opportunities. 

Manchester has an engaged data science community of almost 250 investigators, with methodologists embedded in Schools across the University addressing problems in extracting meaning from data, managing data volume, the variety of data used in analyses, the velocity with which it is produced, and the veracity of those data.

Data science has a home in all of the University's faculties (Engineering and Physical Sciences, Humanities and Medical and Human Sciences) supported across the whole data life cycle by work in the schools of Computer Science and Mathematics.

Scope of Theme

Data Science and AI are becoming increasingly successful in unlocking new knowledge and powering smart applications of digital technology. The theme brings together methodologists from across the University, sharing expertise organising, interpreting, discovering patterns in, and making predictions from complex data. A key feature of the University’s approach is very close coupling between methodologists and translational scientists, drawing on strength-in-depth in real-world applications of data science. The theme includes:

• Machine learning and statistics
• Information management
• Text analytics
• Image analytics
• Numerical algorithms
• Privacy and anonymisation
• Advanced processor technologies