2013 IBM Faculty Award for Manchester in Big Data Engineering

29 Aug 2013

Professor John Keane from the School of Computer Science is one of the winners of IBM's 2013 Big Data and Analytics Faculty Awards.

Professor Keane joins 13 other researchers from around the world who will each receive $10,000 to bring together their innovative research for the benefit of curricular development. The winning proposal at Manchester is one of only four 2013 IBM Faculty awards in the UK.

The award will be used, in collaboration with Dr Goran Nenadic, to support research and teaching in "big data and analytics". In particular, the award will support technical case studies investigating the design and implementation of big data solutions to enhance postgraduate teaching.

Big data constitutes large quantities of raw information generated by changing technologies and corresponding changing organisational practice. The rapidly expanding volume of complex, multi-modal data, allied to its perceived potential, impacts both analytic techniques and organisational context to utilise the analysis results. These impacts have led to the recent emergence of “data scientist” and related activities as a hybrid role requiring mainly technical skills but also understanding of organisational context. The award will support both research and teaching in big data to facilitate such activity.

The IBM Faculty Awards is a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations and to promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM.

About Professor John Keane

Professor Keane holds the MG Singh Chair in Data Engineering at Manchester. His primary interest is data analytics and decision support for complex, multi-modal data. The work embraces a range of applications – from bio-medical to financial - and he works closely with the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology. Professor Keane is Co-Director of the cross-faculty Decision and Cognitive Sciences Research Centre and was part of the team that developed the SUDA system for anonymisation decision support used in statistical agencies across the world. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.