About us

Our work examines the flow of data and the use of computation throughout society, culture and the natural world.

We study how data is generated, used, and governed by people and organisations. We also study the skills that they need and the infrastructures that they rely one. We research how data and computation can benefit society.

Expertise

DAIS brings together expertise in Data Management, Societal Interaction, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, Web Science and Internet Science and engages in interdisciplinary research in these areas. Themes of DAIS research include:

Data in society

secure data interchange and marketplaces
semantic web and knowledge graphs
data infrastructures and data sovereignty
sensors in culture and the environment
provenance

Societal interaction

online education and learning
online storytelling
cultural heritage

Data and software in research

software sustainability
research software engineering
research data collection
research repositories

AI in society

generative information retrieval
decentralised information retrieval and AI
AI in civics
AI skills and professions
AI tools for research
AI in data economy

Contributions

We are part of several global education, research, and enterprise networks. We engage with the wider community to address some of the greatest challenges emerging from the interaction between data, intelligence and society. These include:

Web Science Trust Network of Laboratories, which brings together research labs around the world who specialise in web science
Open Data Institute (ODI) is a non-profit company funded by Technology Strategy Board. Its goal is to release the potential of open data on both economical and social levels, and enable open data to generate demands, create opportunities for new types of businesses
Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) that supports building better and sustainable software to support world-class research
The Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s institute for data science and artificial intelligence