Research

• The Name "Living Analytics"
• Research Priorities
• Essence of Living Analytics
• Research Areas
• Why Living Analytics
• Hard Research Challenges
• Data Settings
• Approved LARC Projects

The LARC aspires to become the world’s first and foremost coordinated and integrated effort in an “open” university setting to develop and advance work at the intersection of these five research areas shown below.

• Intelligent Systems for Mining and Analytics: This area focuses on developing and demonstrating theories, algorithms, methods and systems for mining and analyzing evolving and continuously expanding networks, using datasets from industry collaborators, from our own testbeds, as well as from crawling publically available online user networks (e.g. Twitter, blogs).

  These streams of data will be used to understand how networks, and the interesting dynamic patterns in them, form and evolve. These methods, together with the enabling tools, software applications, and systems, lay the foundation for developing new applications in marketing, product recommendation, consumer engagement, and social trend prediction.

• Social and Management Science: This area draws upon behavioral science, social science and management science theories and knowledge to model, explain, predict and interact with user and group behaviors in different dynamic user networks.

  The Centre will incrementally build up the ability to observe and analyze the behavior of users and groups in the network in or near real-time, as it is occurring, and to follow the evolution of network behavior over extended periods of time. These abilities will open up new horizons for social and management science analysis and applications.

  The Centre intends to develop new theoretical, methodological, and empirical extensions for dynamic multidimensional user networks, and experimentally explore how user and group behaviors in the network can be influenced by the use of various types of incentives and feedback, or by modifying the ways users interact with one another, or interact with the content or experience being provided.

• Network Experimentation: The ability to plan, execute and interpret experiments in these real-time networked settings of users and their group interactions is critically important to the LARC effort. Advances in experimental methods are required to go beyond the standard types of correlation analysis and pattern detection which are so commonly used in the work to-date.

  Increasingly “networked” social interactions invalidate many of the bedrock assumptions of experimental design and statistical analysis. Therefore, the Centre needs to create new experimental and statistical methods suited for these types of dynamic, networked phenomena. These methods and the supporting tools must be suited for application in the Living Analytics context of massive amounts of geo-spatial-centric real-world data in the form of the digital traces of “daily living” from people interacting in complex and changing ways, collected on an ongoing basis through automated means.

  The LARC aspires to make pioneering breakthroughs in statistical and experimental theories, methods and tools for conducting Behavioral Insight Experiments within pervasively networked environments.

• Security, Data Fusion and Privacy Preservation: Because of the sensitive and occasionally fragmentary data from industrial collaborators, the Centre also needs to focus on security, data fusion and privacy preservation. In this area, the research focus will be on establishing secure settings for the work of LARC and developing new data fusion and privacy preserving techniques for network data from different data sources.

  Invariably, current legal, regulatory and policy frameworks related to data privacy will bump up against current and emerging realities of data observation, data management and data analytics in the current and emerging "networked society." Even with the removal of personal identifiers, partner datsets need to be held in protected environments with controlled access. Thus our focus on security. To the extent possible and practical, we will also provide broader access to privacy-protected extracts of databases. In addition, the Centre will share insights and lessons learned related to these "bumps" with the appropriate public and private sector organizations responsible for data privacy related laws, regulations, policies and practices, and provide constructive recommendations to address near-term as well as mid- and long-term issues.

• Systems and Infrastructure: This area addresses the sensing, computing, storage, and network requirements of conducting living analytics research in a scalable manner. This will also include experimenting with state-of-the-art smart phones, as well as with using cloud computing capabilities in innovative ways to implement our methods, applications and systems.