The digital revolution is producing increasing amounts of data in virtually all areas of the human enterprise, including industry, government and university sectors. Medicine, Science, Internet, Trading, Telephony, Advertisement, Banking, and Publishing now rely on vast and ever-increasing data repositories. This poses fundamental problems:
- How to extract relevant knowledge and meaning out of this ocean of data?
- How to learn which diseases are hidden in a string of DNA?
- How to discover what is the core message buried in the textual description of a webpage?
- How to predict a market crash from trading patterns?
NICTA's Statistical Machine Learning (SML) group researches new methods that can automatically extract knowledge from raw data, in the spirit of the above questions. We apply these methods in several domains, from the Internet to Medicine, mainly via partnerships with domain experts. The digital revolution is just the beginning. We now need to make sense of all this data to solve real problems in society.