Accelerating data science at the Alan Turing Institute with Microsoft Azure

Researchers at the Alan Turing Institute in the United Kingdom are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to push the state of the art in data science to better understand what makes us happy, angry and frustrated.

For example, many people believe that the environment they spend their time in profoundly impacts their day-to-day well-being. Until recently, however, scientists lacked the data to test this hypothesis. Now, the world is awash in data along with the computing resources to quantitatively analyze what settings make people happy.

Chanuki Seresinhe, a computational social sciences researcher at the Turing, is using deep learning on Microsoft Azure GPUs (graphical processing units) to analyze overall a million ratings of scenery from across the UK. “I originally did my image processing on my own computer, taking months to do what now takes just days,” she says. “But being able to correlate large, unstructured data sets using Azure is helping me really push out the horizons of my investigations. That’s huge.”