Business

Data Science can is a crucial component with in today’s business analytics environments. By harnessing data, business can achieve insight into business operations, sales, and planning. ADS works closely with the Amsterdam Center for Business Analytics and the Amsterdam Business School on data science related projects, research and education.

City Analytics

The increasing volume and detail of information captured by government and enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things will fuel exponential growth in digital city data for the foreseeable future. Information, facts, interaction traces, news, data, and memories are being stored in huge quantities as never seen before. This will redefine the relations between people and their view on urban challenges concerning for instance energy, water, news, care, logistics and personalized media. ADS aims to make this data easily accessible and an asset for predictive analytics, decision making, and personalized experiences.

Digital Humanities

The digitization of archives containing e.g. documents, paintings, or films and the proliferation of cultural data on the web has a dramatic effect on how research in the humanities is conducted. Huge collections of study material are available to humanities researchers. But getting access to the data, processing the data, analyzing the data, and deriving new knowledge from such collections is difficult due to limited availability of dedicated tools. In this theme, ADS collaborates with CCCT and the Network Institute.

Health and Life Sciences

Managing information and handling of very large and dynamic datasets is at the core of providing a cost-effective and high-quality healthcare system. Poor information management is widely seen as one of the main bottlenecks in improving healthcare. Major challenges are the (semantic) interoperability between systems, intelligent support for medical decision making, bridging the gap between medical research and clinical care and providing transparent quality indicators.

ICT and Sustainability

With the increasing role played by ICT in supporting our society, its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors in the development and operation of software-intensive systems. Such systems are essential in our work, support governments and societal dynamics, sustain our lifestyles, help us socialize, further our knowledge, be healthy. This pervasiveness, however, demands for ever increasing energy. And the way this support is provided can favor, or hinder, more sustainable behaviors. ADS works in this space with the Network Institute.

Intelligence and Security

Intelligence and security are moving from an analogue to a digital world. Evidence in complex criminal cases now comprises mainly of digital data, most of which is in the form of text, documents, images, video-, and audio recording, and associated metadata. The volume of data per case is also growing exponentially. In the Netherlands, the police and tax authorities together handle an estimated 10.000 cases a year each of which – on average – 4 terabytes of data, a million files and 10 million traces. The volume and heterogeneity of the data impacts all aspects of the security process. ADS works in close collaboration with the Co van Ledden Hulsebosch centre for forensic science to develop methods for handling such large amounts of data and helping investigators to find evidence in such collections.

Behavioural Analysis

The Internet and the proliferation of mobile devices has created a society in which social relations are more and more defined by social media. Getting insight in society as a whole and the changing role of individuals and groups in this society requires the analysis of huge amounts of textual and visual data as well as statistical models. ADS works in this space with the Network Institute.