About the Big Data Zone

Simulated data modeled for the particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

Our final zone in the 2014 Big Data Season is funded by the Science & Technology Facilities Council and will explore how computing is applied not only to biology, but also in other areas like astronomy, particle physics or meteorology.

We live in the era of computers and Big Data. Physicists use computers to store and analyse data to measure atmospheric conditions, develop new weather forecaster models, or model how the universe is constructed. Chemists study molecular structures through crystallography through complex computer transformations. Geneticists are working out the details of the building blocks of life through sequencing genes. Epidemiologists try to understand out how disease spreads using computer models of millions of people. Neuroscientists are embarking on projects to recreate the brain using computer networks. And we could go on, and on…

In the Big Data Zone you’ll meet five scientists with very exciting jobs. There are scientists who are helping to design giant telescopes to watch clusters of galaxies crash into each other all across the Universe. There are scientists studying how Wikipedia and other online groups make decisions, there are scientists looking after the computers used to store the data produced at the Large Hadron Collider, and search for the key insights buried within those data. There are scientists building giant telescopes, and scientists running simulations to explain the movements of far away planets.