What we do

Manchester’s Institute for Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (IDSAI) acts as an access point to the University’s expertise in data science and artificial intelligence, facilitates interactions between researchers and problem holders, owns the University’s data science strategy, and delivers sustainable support for the community.

Manchester has an engaged data science community of over 800 researchers, with methodologists embedded in Schools across the University addressing problems in extracting meaning from data, managing data volume, the variety of data used in analyses, the velocity with which it is produced and the veracity of those data.

Data science has a home in all three of the University’s faculties (Science and Engineering; Humanities; Biology, Medicine & Health Sciences). Our expertise covers the complete data science life-cycle: from information management, through analytics, to practical applications. A key feature of our approach is very close coupling between methodologists and translational scientists, drawing on strength-in-depth in real-world applications of data science. This creates a virtuous circle, where challenging real-world problems drive the methodology research agenda, whilst providing a natural route to exploiting new algorithms and methods. We believe this deeply multidisciplinary approach is one of the distinctive features of data science at Manchester.

IDSAI is a key theme within the University’s Digital Futures platform. Digital Futures is a highly interdisciplinary network that operates across the whole range of the University’s digital research, which aims to present a coherent overview of our digital research activity to external stakeholders and bring together our research communities to explore new research areas and address strategic opportunities.