The Lloyd's Register Foundation has chipped in £10 million to support the Alan Turing Institute for big data research, and produced its own review of the need for big data in industry.

The Institute, announced in the 2014 Budget, aims to create a world-leading academic research facility for big data analytics. It will have £42 million of government money over the next five years, and expects to pull in another £50 million from industry, alongside the £10 million from the Foundation - a leading charity for engineering research.

Industry needs to become "data centric" to capitalize on the vast quantity of information which is being generated by humans online, and the increasing use of sensors to gather environmental data and track the performance, said Professor Nigel Shadbolt, of the Open Data Institute, at the announcement in the Lloyd's Register building.

Need for research
"We are at the limit of our ability to make sense of large scale data," said Professor Shadbolt (pictured), pointing out that engineers handle orders of magnitude more data than business people, and physicists, working on projects like the Large Hadron Collider, deal with even more.

The world is modelled at various levels, he said. For instance, the UK rail network has around ten fleets of trains, with perhaps 500 vehicles in each. The vehicles include some 50 systems, each with ten subsystems eacn with 100 components.

The Alan Turing Institute was announced by the UK chancellor George Osborne in March 2014, aiming to work with Universities to support "first class resaerch" in big data. It will open next year in the British Library, in what is apparently becoming known as London's "knowledge quarter".

Commercial partners are expected shortly, the government chief scientific adviser Sir Mark Walport told the press. Until they arrive, the shape and work programme of the Institute is not entirely settled - so the Lloyd's grant is technically "conditional".

The Institute expects its work to affect industries including insurance, finance, health, logistics aerospace, energy  and transport.

"The future value of big data will only be realised if there is organisational and cultural change, accompanied by appropriate tools, skills and practices," said Professor Shadbolt in the Foreword to the Foundationsl Foresight Review of Big Data which can be downloaded here.