{"id":431835,"date":"2017-10-20T05:50:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-20T12:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=431835"},"modified":"2017-10-24T08:06:24","modified_gmt":"2017-10-24T15:06:24","slug":"changing-the-world-with-data-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/changing-the-world-with-data-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Changing the world with data science"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Alan Turing asked the question \u201ccan machines think?\u201d in 1950 and it still intrigues us today. At The Alan Turing Institute (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, the United Kingdom\u2019s national institute for data science in London, more than 150 researchers are pursuing this question by bringing their thinking to fundamental and real-world problems to push the boundaries of data science.<\/p>\n

One year ago, The Turing first opened its doors to 37 PhD students, 117 Turing Fellows and visiting researchers, 6 research software engineers and more than 5,000 researchers for its workshops and events. I have been privileged to be one of these visiting fellows, helping the researchers take a cloud-first approach through our contribution of $5 million of Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits<\/a> to The Turing. To be part of this world-leading center of data science research is exhilarating. Cloud computing is unlocking an impressive level of ambition at The Turing, allowing researchers to think bigger and unleash their creativity.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe have had an exceptional first year of research at The Turing. Working with Microsoft, our growing community of researchers have been tooled up with skills and access to Azure for cloud computing and as a result they\u2019ve been able to undertake complex data science tasks at speed and with maximum efficiency, as illustrated by some of the stories of Turing research showcased today. We look forward to growing our engagement with the Azure platform to help us to undertake even bigger and more ambitious research over the coming academic year.\u201d<\/h5>\n
~ Andrew Blake, Research Director, The Alan Turing Institute
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Human society is one of the most complex systems on the planet and measuring aspects of it has been extremely difficult until now. Merve Alanyali and Chanuki Seresinhe are graduate students from the University of Warwick who are spending a year at The Turing applying novel computational social science techniques to understand human happiness and frustration<\/a>. They are using AI and deep neural networks to analyze millions of online photos with Microsoft Azure and their findings are providing deeper insights into the human condition (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n