Big Data and scientific research: the very small, the fairly big and the massive

Advances in technology mean that we can now analyse single cells in unprecedented detail. The Human Cell Atlas is an ambitious collaborative project that aims to to map all cells in the human body. This talk will introduce the project itself, the technology it will use to analyse our cells and the software platform being built to support producing a 'Google Maps' for the human body.

The increasing severity and frequency of high-impact weather events means more of us are living under the threat of flooding, heat waves, or drought. To increase our resilience to these events, there is an urgent need to make regional climate predictions more useful and actionable. In this talk I will discuss ways in which machine learning can help unlock the potential within the vast volumes of environmental data available.

Up until 2001, cosmology was an imprecise science, data sets were limited and most insights gained from them were qualitative; a successful theory needed only to fit within the right order of magnitude. This changed with the WMAP measurement of the cosmic microwave background radiation, shunting cosmology into a quantitative era where now predictions have to agree at the percent level. In this talk I will introduce the standard cosmological model, discuss how cosmology has evolved into a data driven science, and how it will have to change in the future for vast experiments.