University of Glasgow - Schools - School of Computing Science - Research - Research sections

Information, Data & Analysis (IDA) Section

Overview

Technological advances in sensing, data acquisition, mobile devices and the impact of the Internet are leading to increasing amounts of data sampled more rapidly and comprehensively than ever before. If we are to acquire novel insights and knowledge from this data, it needs to be matched by innovations in data management, storage and retrieval and ultimately in data analytics. The many forms of data, their complexity and variations present challenges from information and data systems, to algorithms and inference about patterns through modelling, leading to visualisation, communication and human-computer interaction.

The Information, Data and Analysis Section is led by Professor Iadh Ounis, and has 31 academics, and 53 Post-Doctoral Fellows, Research Assistants and Ph.D. students active in this area. Our research is organised in four world-leading groups in data systems, human-computer interaction & machine learning, information retrieval, and computer vision & autonomous systems:

KDES - Knowledge & Data Engineering Systems Group
(Dr Nikos Ntarmos, Dr Christos Anagnostopoulos)
IDI - Information, Dynamics and Interaction
(Prof. Roderick Murray-Smith, Dr John Williamson, Dr Ke Yuan, Dr Fani Deligianni, Dr Nicolas Pugeault, Dr Jonathan Grizou, Dr Chris McCaig, Dr Kevin Bryson, Dr Paul Henderson, Dr Ali Gooya, Dr Hang Dai)
IR - Information Retrieval
(Prof. Iadh Ounis, Prof. Joemon Jose, Prof. Craig MacDonald, Dr Jeff Dalton, Dr Richard McCreadie, Dr Graham McDonald, Dr Chris McCaig, Dr Debasis Ganguly, Dr Jake Lever, Dr Sean MacAvaney, Dr Zaiqaio Meng)
CVAS - Computer Vision and Autonomous Systems
(Dr Paul Siebert, Dr Gerardo Aragon Camarasa, Dr Nicolas Pugeault, Dr Paul Henderson, Dr Ali Gooya, Dr Edmond Ho, Dr Hang Dai)

News

July 2024: Best Paper Runner Up at SIGIR 2024

Sean MacAvaney's paper A reproducibility study of PLAID was a runner-up for the best paper award at SIGIR 2024, the #1 conference for Information Retrieval.

Upcoming conference: British Machine Vision Conference, November 2024

The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) is the British Machine Vision Association's (BMVA) annual conference on machine vision, image processing, and pattern recognition. It is one of the major (CORE A) international conferences on computer vision held in the UK. We are hosting this year's conference in Glasgow, with several IDA academics organising the event: Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa and Edmond Ho (general chairs); Paul Henderson and Nicolas Pugeault (programme chairs); Fani Deligianni and Hang Dai (industrial / keynote chairs); Ali Gooya (workshop chair).

Upcoming conference: IEEE ICDCS, July 2025

IEEE ICDCS is the leading and premier international conference (CORE A* ranked) focusing on distributed computing systems. ICDCS is the oldest conference in the field of distributed computing systems in the world. It was launched by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP) in October 1979, and is sponsored by such committee becoming an annual conference since 1983. The ICDCS has a long history of significant achievements and worldwide visibility, and will celebrate its 45th year in Glasgow, Scotland. It provides a research and social venue for researchers, academics, and professionals to present and discuss the latest research in the field. The conference covers important topics including Distributed AI, Data-centric AI/ML, Distributed Data Science, Federated Learning Systems, and more. As the world is increasingly moving towards the adoption and integration of AI-driven data systems across various sectors, Glasgow is important to host conferences in the field. ICDCS serves as a platform to highlight the strength and vision of IDA, University of Glasgow and the city of Glasgow fully sponsored by IEEE CS. IDA academics and researchers are part of the organizing committee with Christos and Iadh (General Chairs), Graham (Finance Chair), Fani (Publication Chair) and Shameem (Local Organization Chair).

June 2024: Newly funded EU/Horizon project COIN-3D

The EU Horizon-awarded project COIN-3D: Collaborative Innovation in 3D VLSI Reliability (2024-2027) led by Christos (Technical Coordinator), fosters strategic networking and knowledge exchange between leading European research institutions (incl. University of Bremen and University of Amsterdam) to enhance research management and commercialization capacities in the area of 2.5/3D AI-chiplet architectures. The University of Glasgow/IDA plays a crucial role within this project by contributing not only to the advancement of ML/AI-driven VLSI design and reliability but also to strengthening international collaborations and sharing critical technological insights.

March 2024: Glasgow hosted the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)

Graham McDonald, Craig Macdonald and Iadh Ounis chaired the 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) this year, which took place in Glasgow over the 24th – 28th March. The conference was a great success, drawing in over 400 attendees for the 5 days. Graham also published an article in The Herald, "Why we need codes of practice for AI information services" discussing the importance of ethical information retrieval in our modern age, which was one of the major topics for discussion at the conference

February 2023: The Tony Kent Strix Award – 8th Annual Memorial Lecture

Professor Iadh Ounis presented his award lecture on Thursday 23rd February 2023.

Dr. Ryen White (Glasgow IR Group Alumni) also gave his award presentation.

December 2022: Professor Iadh Ounis was awarded the prestigious international 2022 Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of information retrieval research and development.

Professor Ounis is noted for his sustained contributions to advances in information retrieval, his inspirational leadership, commitment to PhD education, research and contributions to R&D through open-source software and information retrieval tools. The highly valued Terrier and PyTerrier platforms have been utilised extensively across the information retrieval community and advanced research significantly. His work on many information retrieval tasks including expert search models, search results diversification, search ranking, recommendation, fake news detection and query performance prediction has furthered the community’s understanding of some of the most fundamental information retrieval questions.

October 2022: Dr. Graham McDonald (PI), Dr. Jake Lever and Prof. Iadh Ounis secured an EPSRC New Horizons award for their project SIEPH: Safe Information Extraction from Patient Histories. The project will develop machine learning methods for safely extracting useful information from patients’ medical records for medical researchers while maintaining patient privacy.

June 2022: A team of students, led by Dr Jeff Dalton, are the winners of a major international competition to develop next-generation conversational assistants. The GRILL team (grilllab.ai) took first place in Amazon’s Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, beating out nine leading research teams worldwide. The competition, launched in June 2021, challenged university students to develop conversational agents that assist people in completing cooking and do-it-yourself home improvement tasks that required multiple steps and complex decisions.

April 2022: Dr. Fani Deligianni (PI) secured an three year (2022-2025) EPSRC New Investigator Award for the project Privacy-Preserved Human Motion Analysis for Healthcare Applications, which will develop artificial intelligence algorithms for human motion analysis in healthcare applications that preserve users' privacy.