Our DDI hubs
The Data-Driven Innovation initiative has helped establish six hubs at the University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University – creating a regional power-house for collaboration with industry partners. The hubs house expertise and facilities to help 10 industrial sectors become more innovative through data.
Bayes Centre
Opened in October 2018, the Bayes Centre provides an innovative environment to support the co-location of up to 600 world-leading applied data science researchers, students, and collaborating staff from organisations across the public, private and third sectors. The Centre is also home to the Post-Covid AI Accelerator, the Data Science Technology and Innovation online PGT programme and coordinates the internationally acclaimed EIE programme.
Focussing on the facilitation of translational research and development, the Bayes Centre connects industry partners to academic and research expertise from across the institution, as well as organisations like the Alan Turing Institute and the Data Lab.
National Robotarium
The National Robotarium is a world-leading centre in robotics and AI, based at Heriot-Watt University. It creates innovative solutions to global challenges, working directly with industry to research, test and develop robotic, AI and automated technologies that have a positive impact on the economy and society. The National Robotarium uses AI and robotics to help make us safer, healthier, and more productive. Through its globally significant work, the National Robotarium develops talent and shapes the future, having a positive impact on the economy and society.
Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI)
Edinburgh Futures Institute is creating a new environment for data-rich learning, teaching, research and innovation – and they are doing it side-by-side with communities, organisations, businesses and industry. Recognising that the biggest challenges facing societies globally are complex and interconnected, and that insight, innovation and impact come from bringing people and knowledge together across multiple disciplines, the Futures Institute collaborates to address complex challenges and make positive impact.
The Futures Institute is working with organisations and professionals, from sectors like fintech, creative industries, public services and tourism to tackle challenges, improve products and services, and develop new ones through better use and understanding of data. The Institute’s portfolio of new postgraduate study options includes core data skills, ensuring graduates learn data-led decision making, data innovation and collaboration, and the fundamentals of data ethics.
Usher Building
Through the application of data science, the Usher Building is driving innovation in health and social care that improves lives.
Located at Edinburgh BioQuarter, the new Usher building will become a world-leading hub where health and social care research teams collaborate with colleagues from public, private and third sector organisations to deliver data-driven advances in health and social care.
This newly established innovation community will develop solutions to our most pressing sector challenges by integrating the activities of: clinicians, life scientists and data scientists to identify new, co-produced insights; and industry and public sector organisations to extract, apply and commercialise expert knowledge.
Based at the building, the Usher Institute is drawing on Scotland’s mature and world-leading health data assets, establishing ‘DataLoch’ - a unique and secure data service to support transformative research and innovation for the region and beyond. Robust, efficient governance and data-sharing protocols have been developed in partnership with the National Health Service, informed by public perspectives.
An ambitious Talent programme will provide a suite of education and training to support a future workforce with the knowledge and skills to drive the use of data and digital technologies to transform the delivery of care.
Easter Bush Agritech Hub
The mission of the Easter Bush Agritech Hub is to achieve sustainable agriculture, control diseases and enhance health through pioneering animal bioscience.
Toward sustainable agriculture, the Hub partners with animal breeding companies with global reach to improve the productivity, efficiency and welfare of terrestrial and aquatic farmed animals by dissecting the basis of heritable traits and implementing genomic selection in breeding programmes. With funding from the Gates Foundation and Foreign & Commonwealth Development Office, it also aims to drive genetic gain in farmed animals indigenous to low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Toward control of animal and zoonotic diseases, the Hub studies the contribution of pathogen and host factors to the outcome of infections and uses this information to design and evaluate control strategies, including novel diagnostics, treatments and vaccines, as well as by genome editing or selective breeding for heritable resistance.
The Hub aims to enhance health across species, including farmed animals, companion animals, and humans, through the use of animal models of human diseases. The Hub offers unique national capabilities and rare expertise that is widely adopted by businesses. Its work tackles urgent global crises, including feeding a growing population while mitigating the negative impacts of animal production on the climate, environment, biodiversity and drug resistance.
The Hub benefits from strategic investment from the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research council in The Roslin Institute, which offers rare infrastructure, resources and expertise to study terrestrial and aquatic farmed animals and has extensive connections across the research and innovation system linked to the Hub’s mission.
Edinburgh International Data Facility
The Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF) provides the enabling data infrastructure platform for the wider DDI initiative and its hubs. The DDI activities require an extremely powerful, high capacity and flexible infrastructure, capable of responsive delivery of an expanding range of complex and bespoke data and analytical services.
By leveraging prior investments in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), and its Advanced Computing Facility (ACF), the EIDF represents a practical, flexible and cost-effective approach to the delivery of diverse technological requirements.
