The Data Observatory is a data visualisation studio and decision-making space, housed in the Data Science Institute. The Data Observatory will facilitate decision-making through immersive, multi-dimensional presentation of data and analysis that allows decision makers to participate in exploring data, weighing the findings of triangulating analytical exercises, translating analytical findings into insights, and deriving the implications and actions suggested by insights from the analytics.

The DSI have been developing, building and maintaining a £1M Private Cloud facility built around Huawei equipment. 

The private cloud infrastructure maintained solely by the DSI, offers a subclass of computing hardware previously not available at Imperial. The infrastructure uses different physical chips called Tensor Processing Units which offer a more advanced and optimised computational building block to help with the development of artificial intelligence.

The cloud helps provide researchers with flexible on-demand virtual environments and other software services such as databases at scale. As such, the infrastructure is used by a variety of researchers across the Faculty of Medicine, Faculty of Engineering and other departments at Imperial.  

Our central location on the main thoroughfare of the South Kensington Campus means that we are able to incorporate visualisation technology in the form of a display wall onto the facade of the Kensington Hub, to enable communciation with students, academic staff, and visitors. To compliment this, there is also a touch sensitive display accessible to passers-by for an interactive experience (find out more here) . 

Find out more about the Visual Corridor on the Visual Corridor webpage.