Important sources of data that are only starting to be explored come from social media, on-line full text science literature, on-line video material, on-line click and interaction patterns, financial transactions, customer behaviour, sensors and scientific instrumentation. Being able to employ such data will improve the efficiency of our government, the quality of our health care, steer innovation in business, the effectiveness of our military and last but not least, catalyze new discoveries in science.

Fundamental research

To address the challenges of this data explosion, to gain insight into and to exploit opportunities of large diverse datasets, several groups of the Informatics Institute (IvI) joined forces to conduct fundamental research in storing and processing data, analysing and modeling data, extracting meaning from data and making decisions based on data.

To succeed, the broad expertise of the research groups at the Informatics Institute is mobilized and combined in the research cluster 'Informatics for a Data rich World. Topics range from low level acquisition, transportation and storage of data, distributed computing, searching through data and retrieving relevant information, mining data to extract meaning, data-driven modeling and simulating real world phenomena to make predictions and enable decision support for acting on relevant information.