A cross-discipline team at Newcastle University has been bringing together expertise in causality modelling - finding new ways of improving processes that touch on our daily lives.

Their research into this specific type of mathematical modelling allows them to estimate and forecast the outcome of a given situation. It's based on the relationships between a number of variables and can be used, for example, to establish whether a new piece of equipment will help alleviate bottlenecks in hospital services.

Their sophisticated hardware and software technologies now help complex organisations to handle and make sense of huge quantities of data and increase the accuracy of the decisions they make.

Extracting knowledge

Newcastle’s expertise in process mining (extracting knowledge from event logs), is now helping organisations to identify behaviours and consider the connections and causes between events.

A toolkit created by the team has been used to analyse the event logs of more than 100 organisations from ING Bank to Deloitte.

The substantial body of work was led by Alex Yakovlev, Professor of Computer Systems Design, and Maciej Koutny, Professor of Computing Science. 

Powering financial markets

Transactions worth billions on the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, are powered by hardware made by Intel. Hardware designed with the help of research that was carried out at Newcastle University.

This research was crucial to the worldwide adoption of asynchronous microprocessor chips.  Sometimes described as clockless chips - they don’t use a clock to time the entire chip, so can overcome speed and power-supply headaches.

Financial traders now rely on these fast and powerful chips when analysing vast quantities of data. 

Phenomenal potential

Professor Koutny said: “In our data-driven world the potential applications for the tools we have developed is endless. They could hold the key to solving everything from e-crime investigations to identifying bottlenecks in hospital services.”

Professor Yakovlev added: “New technologies and the Internet of Things, will depend on close interaction between computers and the electrical devices we use. Without a common language between the two this could not progress.

“The fundamental research carried out at Newcastle University is helping to find the common ground between the two disciplines and accelerate the exciting progress being made.”