Summary of the impact

A Portsmouth team has helped revolutionise how flight data from aircraft flight recorders is being analysed. This has improved the corporate performance of a leading UK company in a globally competitive market by helping it expand its business in the UK and to subsequently compete in the dynamic North American market. Historically, data was manually evaluated on a flight by flight basis. Research by the Portsmouth team means such data can now be analysed automatically by artificial intelligence (AI), saving significant man-hours, and allowing the company to diversify domestically into a related market and to expand internationally. The techniques developed were subsequently applied in a new market, enabling the new corporate partner to realise savings estimated at £100,000 p.a.

Summary of the impact

This case study describes the national and international impact of research undertaken by Professor Chao, as part of an EU funded Framework 7 project, Digital Environment Home Energy Management Systems (DEHEMS). The project has improved existing household energy monitoring, tackling the issues of global warming and CO₂ emission reduction in the domestic sector. The research has directly contributed to the development of a product called EnergyHive, subsequently marketed by Small to Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) Hildebrand Ltd, who was the industrial partner in the DEHEMS consortium. The research has delivered the following:

• Economic impact — as a direct result of the research project, Hildebrand Ltd has diversified and entered into an entirely new market;
• Impact on the environment — home owners, local authorities and energy companies have installed EnergyHive meters which have shown significant energy and carbon dioxide reductions.

Beneficiaries of the research and the subsequent impact include: a commercial business, domestic energy consumers, UK and international energy companies and local authorities.

Summary of the impact

The research improves digital data archives by embedding computation into the storage controllers that maintain the integrity of the data within the archive. This opens up a number of possibilities:

• Data analysis can be automated and incorporated into the archiving process;
• The approach improves the archiving of all types of digital objects, from television broadcasts to genomes;
• The approach can be applied to distributed data and to datasets that are too big for traditional approaches.

This has impact on three different classes of beneficiary:

• Providers of national data infrastructure in the UK and US, who are incorporating Cheshire 3 into national data repositories;
• Data Users, such as Astra Zeneca, RAI, Sanger Institute, who are using Cheshire 3 to extract valuable information from their data;
• Equipment vendors, such as NetApp, Xerox and Bellerophon Mobile, who are developing commercial systems that will use Cheshire 3.

Summary of the impact

Targeted Projection Pursuit (TPP) — developed at Northumbria University — is a novel method for interactive exploration of high-dimension data sets without loss of information. The TPP method performs better than current dimension-reduction methods since it finds projections that best approximate a target view enhanced by certain prior knowledge about the data. "Valley Care" provides a Telecare service to over 5,000 customers as part of Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, and delivers a core service for vulnerable and elderly people (receiving an estimated 129,000 calls per annum) that allows them to live independently and remain in their homes longer. The service informs a wider UK ageing community as part of the NHS Foundation Trust.

Applying our research enabled the managers of Valley Care to establish the volume, type and frequency of calls, identify users at high risk, and to inform the manufacturers of the equipment how to update the database software. This enabled Valley Care managers and staff to analyse the information quickly in order to plan efficiently the work of call operators and social care workers. Our study also provided knowledge about usage patterns of the technology and valuably identified clients at high risk of falls. This is the first time that mathematical and statistical analysis of data sets of this type has been done in the UK and Europe.

As a result of applying the TPP method to its Call Centre multivariate data, Valley Care has been able to transform the quality and efficiency of its service, while operating within the same budget.

Summary of the impact

Visual analytics is a powerful method for understanding large and complex datasets that makes information accessible to non-statistically trained users. The Non-linearity and Complexity Research Group (NCRG) developed several fundamental algorithms and brought them to users by developing interactive software tools (e.g. Netlab pattern analysis toolbox in 2002 (more than 40,000 downloads), Data Visualisation and Modelling System (DVMS) in 2012).

Industrial products. These software tools are used by industrial partners (Pfizer, Dstl) in their business activities. The algorithms have been integrated into a commercial tool (p:IGI) used in geochemical analysis for oil and gas exploration with a 60% share of the worldwide market.

Improving business performance. As an enabling technology, visual analytics has played an important role in the data analysis that has led to the development of new products, such as the Body Volume Index, and the enhancement of existing products (Wheelright: automated vehicle tyre pressure measurement).

Impact on practitioners. The software is used to educate and train skilled people internationally in more than 6 different institutions and is also used by finance professionals.

Summary of the impact

The research in this case study has pioneered knowledge management technology. It has had major impact on drug discovery and translational medicine and is widely adopted in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. The impacts are:

1. The formation of InforSense to commercialise the technology. The company had 150 employees in June 2009 when it merged with IDBS Ltd to create the world's second largest life science informatics company.
2. The results from knowledge management technology and associated software platform have enabled the integration of molecular, imaging, clinical data and analytics, to identify biomarkers for disease identification, treatment selection and side effect prediction.
3. Since 2002 the technology has been deployed by major pharmaceutical companies (including GSK, AZ, Roche, Pfizer, Bayer and Boehringer Ingelheim) and leading healthcare institutions e.g. Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School and King's Health Partners, generating significant social, health and economic impact.

Summary of the impact

KCL research played an essential role in the development of data provenance standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body for web technologies, which is responsible for HTTP, HTML, etc. The provenance of data concerns records of the processes by which data was produced, by whom, from what other data, and similar metadata. The standards directly impact on practitioners and professional services through adoption by commercial, governmental and other bodies, such as Oracle, IBM, and Nasa, in handling computational records of the provenance of data.

Summary of the impact

Advanced technologies for data visualisation and data mining, developed in the Unit in collaboration with national and international teams, are widely applied for development of medical services. In particular, a system for canine lymphoma diagnosis and monitoring developed with [text removed for publication] has now been successfully tested using clinical data from several veterinary clinics. The risk maps produced by our technology provide early diagnosis of lymphoma several weeks before the clinical symptoms develop. [text removed for publication] has estimated the treatment test, named [text removed for publication], developed with the Unit to add [text removed for publication] to the value of their business. Institute Curie (Paris), applies this data mapping technique and the software that has been developed jointly with Leicester in clinical projects.

Summary of the impact

There is growing evidence that official population statistics based on the decennial UK Census are inaccurate at the local authority level, the fundamental administrative unit of the UK. The use of locally-available administrative data sets for counting populations can result in more timely and geographically more flexible data which are more cost-effective to produce than the survey-based Census. Professor Mayhew of City University London has spent the last 13 years conducting research on administrative data and their application to counting populations at local level. This work has focused particularly on linking population estimates to specific applications in health and social care, education and crime. Professor Mayhew developed a methodology that is now used as an alternative to the decennial UK Census by a large number of local councils and health care providers. They have thereby gained access to more accurate, detailed and relevant data which have helped local government officials and communities make better policy decisions and save money. The success of this work has helped to shape thinking on statistics in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and has contributed to the debate over whether the decennial UK Census should be discontinued.

Summary of the impact

[text removed for publication], a developer of high-precision medical devices, have produced a new data annotation tool ([text removed for publication]) based on research in CSRI on data storage formats and activity recognition for applications within smart home environments. Within [text removed for publication] stereo-based cameras record activities in a specified environment (e.g. kitchen) which are then annotated using user-based pre-configured activity labels (e.g. prepare meal, wash dishes). [text removed for publication] is currently used by [text removed for publication] users and has yielded additional sales worth [text removed for publication]. [text removed for publication] have employed [text removed for publication] additional technical development staff to extend [text removed for publication] functionality, and through an MoU [text removed for publication] now supports automated annotation based on CSRI's research on activity recognition.