Chinese telecoms giant Huawei is extending its reach in big data via a collaboration with Imperial College’s new Data Science Institute. The Imperial College-Huawei Data Science Innovation Laboratory will bring together researchers from Imperial and Huawei to develop big data applications in various fields. However, the head of the lab, Yike Guo, said the main focus will be in healthcare and wellbeing (especially health monitoring devices), and smart cities.
Huawei is providing equipment including cloud computing servers, and will both fund the running costs of the lab, and provide a research and innovation fund. Guo told Science|Business the funding is available exclusively to Imperial College researchers and academics.
“Imperial’s Data Science Institute is a focal point for global collaborations with governments, industry and the academic community,” Guo said. “The new Imperial - Huawei Data Science Innovation Lab will show how collaboration between academia and industry can drive innovations in big data.”
The launch of the lab is part of a 10 year partnership agreement between Huawei and Imperial signed in July 2013. The initial agreement for the new laboratory is for 5 years.
In addition to the funding, Huawei will have an operations manager in the lab, but projects will be independently run by Imperial academics. No details of the funding were revealed.
Over the past ten years, Huawei has invested more than 10 per cent of its global revenue in R&D. In 2013 this amounted to US$5.4 billion.
William Xu, Chief Executive Officer of Huawei Enterprise Business Group, said the collaboration with Imperial will help the company stay at the forefront of developments in big data. “By bringing together [Imperial’s] experts and our engineers we believe we can create new products and services that will harness the huge potential of big data,” Xu said.
This collaboration also bolsters a wider partnership programme Huawei has with UK universities, which includes working on the 5G network technologies.
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