This month’s Smart Infrastructure Blog is by CSIC Academic Director and the Turing’s inaugural Chief Scientist Professor Mark Girolami, who makes the case for data-driven insights and collaboration with industry to enable actionable insights to meet the scientific and societal challenges our critical infrastructure faces.
Titled ‘Making the future: transforming data into insights to deliver value’, Professor Girolami highlights the new market opportunities and business models that have emerged in other engineering sectors which previously recognised the necessity to adopt a data-driven perspective, such as for Rolls-Royce in aerospace.
He writes: “In a similar manner, CSIC has, over the last decade, been pivotal in the comprehensive instrumentation of assets from rail bridges to highways, all now producing data-driven insights into their operating condition.” Transforming data into actionable insight is key and CSIC’s work recognises this. “The research area of Data Science is essential for CSIC to develop the new theory, methods and analytic tools which will provide the data-driven actionable insights to meet the scientific and societal challenges our critical infrastructure faces. It will be the enabler for us to transform data into insight, action, control and policy.”
Highlighting the importance of not neglecting mathematical principles key to understanding the dynamics of an asset – “the fundamental laws distilled by our predecessors in civil engineering”, the blog looks to the future possibilities brought by the synthesis of both mathematical models and informative data, concluding: “CSIC will remain at the vanguard of synthesising models and data which will ultimately deliver value to infrastructure construction and operation and support better and sustainable services on which society depends.”
• Read the full Smart Infrastructure Blog by Professor Girolami here