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University College London Launches Big Data Institute

University College London (UCL) will establish the UCL Big Data Institute in collaboration with Elsevier, a provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services.

According to information from UCL, the goal of the institute is "to explore innovative ways to better serve needs of researchers through the exploration of new technologies and analytics as applied to scholarly content and data."

The partnership will give the university access to Elsevier's research data and enterprise-level technology, and the company will fund research and PhD students through the new institute. UCL has a wide range of other research activities and joint initiatives related to big data and research analytics, but according to the university, this partnership will help it better serve researchers by linking analytics and scientific content, and provide opportunities to research the analysis, use and storage of big data.

"The UCL Big Data Institute will keep us at the forefront of addressing pressing issues around the storage of big data, the curation of scientific information, and the production, disclosure and consumption of research information," said Michael Arthur, president and provost of UCL, in a prepared statement. "UCL and Elsevier inevitably have complementary interests in many aspects of research dissemination and will both together and independently continue to develop these for the good of the global research effort."

Elsevier plans to establish a Center of Excellence within its Web analytics group. The center will be co-staffed by UCL researchers and will offer employment and commercialization activities in collaboration with UCL Business and UCL Consultants.

According to UCL, the Big Data Institute will be part of the university's new "Research Domain for e-Research," which is intended to help researchers in diverse fields, from particle physics to digital humanities, share insights into better use of large computational resources in research.

University College London is a public research university located in London, England. It serves 27,000 students and employs 9,000 faculty and staff. UCL is based in Bloomsbury in central London but also has international campuses in Australia and Qatar. The UCL Big Data Institute will be based in London.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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