Waikato University data scientists awarded
$13 million
“We see this project as an opportunity to combine international learnings with the passion of our own data science researchers to preserve New Zealand’s beautiful lakes, rivers, forests, estuaries and mountains for future generations.
University of Waikato data scientists are embarking on new research that will help solve critical environmental problems in the New Zealand context. A $13 million Government grant will fund the seven-year project to develop an open-source platform to be used by environmental practitioners to store and analyse real-time data across New Zealand. The research will guide better environmental decision making and help protect New Zealand’s natural assets, for example, from the effects of climate change. Professor Neil Quigley, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Waikato, says being awarded such significant research funding reflects the world-class data science capabilities of the University’s research teams. “The University of Waikato is an international leader in computer science and we are thrilled to be leading new research of such significance to New Zealand. “This multi-disciplinary project brings data and environmental scientists together with key industry organisations to achieve research outcomes that will deliver a significant, measurable impact,” says Vice Chancellor Quigley. Vice Chancellor Quigley says this is the largest grant to be awarded to researchers in recent years at the University, and the size of the grant shows the project has great potential to provide benefits for New Zealand communities.
The Project
World-leading data scientist and lead researcher for the project, Professor Albert Bifet says this research project will develop new methods to manage large volumes of time series data. He says the findings will have a major positive effect on the environment. “At the moment, there is simply too much data to deal with. The environmental data collected comes from multiple satellites across New Zealand, creating 25 petabytes of information each day. To put that into context, one petabyte equals 500 billion pages of standard printed text. So, you can see how challenging it is to store and process this amount of data. ”Our project aims to build new tools that can handle this volume of data, and most importantly make it amenable and more easily interpreted by organisations who must use the information to make critical decisions that will impact on New Zealand’s environmental future. “This research will deliver practical, fit-for-purpose tools that can be used freely by researchers and practitioners in all areas of the New Zealand environment,” says Professor Bifet. The research project will focus on time series and spatial data to measure elements like rainfall and weather patterns. “The general population relies on land and climate information, as do local and national governing bodies to make economic decisions on the future of the country,” says Professor Karin Bryan, whose area of research focuses on coastal environments. “The data tools created through this project will enable us to determine how the environment is changing – we’ll be able to see more clearly if an element is improving or not. This is particularly crucial for managing climate change. “In New Zealand, we have a small population spread across a complex and varied environment. Our research is critical for formulating a response to climate change, analysing changes to our physical environment and determining appropriate land utilisation.” The data analysis tools created will aim to bridge the gap between those that need the information yielded from the data, and those who are trained to analyse it. Funding was granted from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment via their Strategic Science Investment Fund. The Team The University of Waikato project team is led by world-renowned data scientist, Professor Albert Bifet. Professor Bifet is known globally for his contributions to data science. He is ranked as the number one cited author on data stream mining on Google Scholar, and was a core founder of the MOA machine learning software developed at the University of Waikato. He is also a regular keynote speaker at data science conferences around the world, speaking on data mining and artificial intelligence (AI). He is a recipient of the competitive Entrepreneurial Universities fund, which aims to attract world-leading entrepreneurial researchers to New Zealand – giving them the opportunity to teach at their choice of New Zealand university. Professor Bifet, who has worked for global giants including Yahoo and Huawei, says that his decision to come to the University of Waikato over other New Zealand universities came down to the world-leading data science research at the University. “The data science capabilities at the University of Waikato might be New Zealand’s best-kept secret. For example, the WEKA suite of machine learning is so well known and widely used internationally – but most Kiwis don’t realise that it was developed right here at Waikato. “I chose the University of Waikato because of their world-leading data science research.” The project is a new collaboration between the Universities of Waikato, Auckland and Canterbury, as well as Beca and MetService, and includes world-leading data scientists, data engineers, and environmental scientists. The key research team from the University of Waikato includes lead researcher Professor Albert Bifet, alongside Professor James Brasington, Professor Karin Bryan, Professor Eibe Frank, Professor Geoff Holmes and Professor Bernhard Pfahringer.
Waikato Computer Science helping to change the world
The University of Waikato has created some of the most popular open source tools for machine learning and data management, such as WEKA, MOA, and ADAMS, with WEKA alone receiving more than 10 million downloads. The University of Waikato is renowned for producing worldleading technologists, including researcher Dr Craig Nevill-Manning – who founded Google’s first remote engineering center located in New York, and co-founder of Google DeepMind Dr Shane Legg. The Waikato AI Initiative (WAI) undertakes multi-disciplinary AI research across a range of applications. The main goals of the Waikato AI Initiative are: • To make deployable machine learning technology available to business and government communities to achieve benefits from the age of AI/Big Data • To create scalable sustainable Machine Learning/AI systems These fields have many industry applications, including in fields such as agritech, telecommunications, health, biosecurity and natural language processing. For more information about data-science research at the University of Waikato or to learn more about study options, visit: www.waikato.ac.nz