We have a business plan across the three domains of research, insights and innovation. All of those areas can be revenue generating at different levels, which will make us commercially sustainable. As a business, this means we'll continue to deliver against our mission and our purpose, well beyond the initial 5 year funding provided by UKRI’s Strength in Places Fund.

We want to help improve people's lives through the power of data. We're a not for profit as part of the University of Edinburgh, so that helps us work in areas where other for profit organisations perhaps couldn't. And the fact that we're truly independent means that we have no bias: we're presenting the facts rather than trying to prove somebody else's hypothesis.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) hosts several tech sprints aimed at gathering innovators to address major issues in the market. One of these issues is the increasing problem of Authorised Push Payment fraud. To enable the innovators to work together and find solutions, the FCA required data to be shared - a difficulty because of the commercial sensitivities of working with crime data. At Smart Data Foundry we created synthetic financial data that looked like current account data but had deliberate fraud activity seeded into it. For example, synthetic mobile phone record data that allowed you to see somebody receiving a text message and see activity on their account. As a result, the tech sprint participants were starting to understand how fraud happens, how they could spot it, and what they could put in place to try to stop it. Having synthetic data at that scale for that sort of level of involvement is absolutely unique.

Since 2019, Smart Data Foundry’s driving purpose has been to help improve people’s lives through unlocking the power of financial data. We do that in three ways. We use real data shared with us by some of our data partners for research and for insights, and we create and generate synthetic data to help ignite and drive innovation.

The impact of our efforts on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is tangible, offering them a valuable tool and a resource for engaging with audiences, providing opportunities to view and explore the city from the unique Fringe perspective. For artists participating in the Fringe, this project introduces practical possibilities. It enables them to systematically examine and map the movements of their audiences throughout the city, empowering them to make informed decisions around show promotion strategies and optimising ticket sales. Our continued progress demonstrates how data and creativity can work together to produce positive social change.

edinburghculturalmap.org/research/edinburgh-festival-fringe-open-audience-insights-map/

Creative Informatics forms part of the AHRC funded Creative Industries Clusters Programme and is a partnership between the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Napier University, Codebase and Creative Edinburgh. The project, funded by the DDI initiative, uses data pertaining to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a primary objective of exploring how we could use it to yield valuable insights into the preferences and behaviour of the festival’s attendees within the City of Edinburgh.

I'm incredibly proud that we've got a phenomenal team of colleagues who pulled together at a time of national need and were able to deliver high quality, highly impactful work. Remember, these analyses were high stakes. They were done at speed, and on very large populations. They were fed into policymakers in as close to real time as we could. And it led to important policy changes across Scotland, the UK and indeed, globally.

In terms of being able to help disseminate and communicate the work that we were doing nationally and internationally, DDI has taken us to sectors that were perhaps not immediately on our radar. It's been an incredibly valuable relationship that will continue to prove important as we use cases beyond the pandemic.

We're in this incredibly privileged position that the work from EAVE II has been phenomenally impactful. We were able to produce the world's first estimates around the real world effectiveness of the first dose of the vaccines. And this was done within six to eight weeks of vaccines being rolled out.

The Usher / EAVE II team

This initiative started about a decade ago during the last pandemic that we experienced, H1N1, or more commonly known as Swine Flu. At that time, we created a national data platform across Scotland. It was called the Early Assessment of Vaccine Effectiveness (EAVE), which aimed to assess how well vaccines were working during a pandemic. Once Swine Flu came to an end, we put that platform into what's known as hibernation. So if there was a need for it to be brought out of hibernation in the context of any future pandemic, then hopefully we would be ready - little did we know what was around the corner.