Data Science Institute's Behaviour Analytics Lab Launch

Lab directors Yike Guo and Aldo Faisal introduced the new lab working to understand behaviour in a computational way.

December 14, 2016- 

Imperial College London's Data Science Institute has launched a new Behaviour Analytics Lab. The Lab aims to encourage and facilitate multi-disciplinary research collaborations in order to understand behaviour in a computational, or objective, way.

Dr Aldo Faisal, Director of the Behaviour Analytics Lab, and Professor Yike Guo, Director of the Data Science Institute, opened the event by emphasising the transition of big data to big knowledge and the importance that having a greater understanding of human behaviour will play to many sectors, such as healthcare and business. For example, behaviour analytics could lead to behavioural biomarkers which could be used for predicting how well two groups or two people will work together in a business environment or for rehabilitation purposes. Dr Faisal discussed two flagship projects that will be worked on through the Lab. One of the projects involves multi-Kinect tracking along the Imperial College's Sherfield walkway using the Data Science Institute's Visual Corridor; the other, Life Centurion, involves giving 100 smart phones and 100 smart watches to 100 people for 100 days and tracking their movements. The Lab will also have a focussed seminar programme which will start in the Spring term. 

The launch event welcomed four distinguished speakers: Professor Mauricio Barahona, Professor Paul Matthews, Dr André Brown and Dr Adam Hampshire. Each presented on how behaviour analytics could be beneficial to their field of study. Professor Barahona, from the Department of Mathematics, discussed graph theory for Twitter networks, flows, roles and directionality.  Professor Matthews, from the Department of Medicine, addressed behavioural and data science for precision medicine. With the hope of being able to anticipate asthma flares, calculating depression through how we move, and learning more about the interaction between how the patient feels and how their body reacts, Matthews demonstrated the important place behaviour analytics will have in medicine. Dr Brown from the Institute of Clinical Sciences presented his study on understanding animals/humans in natural environments, through his research on worms. As the wiring of their brains is known and they are easy to raise in labs, worms were given different compounds and tracked through images. Brown found that with a single gene change, the worms began clumping together. Although worms are small in scale to humans, it gives reason and stimulus for further research on behaviour. The last speaker was Dr Hampshire from the Computational, Cognitive and Clinical Neuroimaging Laboratory. He presented several studies regarding internet based cognitive testing and training. Using the internet, large scale populations can be tested and tracked, costing much less than other methods. In the few studies presented, the internet is shown as a key method to analysing behaviour in such ways as pharmaceutical trials and training cognition after traumatic brain injury.

The launch was a great success and now, with the help of the Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute, Imperial College has an active and energetic forum for individuals and groups across campus' to work on issues concerning behaviour analytics together.