Intel France Collaborates with Teratec to Open Big Data Lab

By Valère Dussaux

Here at Intel in France, we recently announced a collaboration with the European-based Teratec consortium to help unlock new insights into sustainable cities, precision agriculture and personalized medicine. These three themes are closely interlinked because each of them requires significant high performance computing power and big data analysis.

Providing Technology and Knowledge

The Teratec campus, located south of Paris, is comprised of more than 80 organisations from the world of commerce and academia. It's a fantastic opportunity for us at Intel to provide our expertise not only in the form of servers, networking solutions and big data analytics software but also by utilising the skills and knowledge of our data scientists who will work closely with other scientists on the vast science and technology park.

The big data lab will be our principal lab for Europe and will initially be focused on proof of concept works with our first project being in the area of precision agriculture. As we progress techniques we will bring the learnings into the personalized medicine arena where one of our big focuses is the analysis of merged clinical data and genomic data that are currently stored in silos as we seek to advance the processing of unstructured data.

Additionally we will also be focusing on the analysis of merged clinical data and open data like weather, traffic and other publically available data in order to help healthcare organizations to enhance resource allocation and health insurers and payers to build sustainable healthcare systems.

Lab makes Global impact

You may be asking why Intel is opening up a big data lab in France. Well, the work we will be undertaking at Teratec will not only benefit colleagues and partners in France or Europe, but globally too. The challenges we all face as a collective around an ageing population and movement of people towards big cities present unique problems, with healthcare very much towards the top of that list. And France presents a great environment for innovation, especially in the 3 focus areas, as the Government here is in the process of promulgating a set of laws that will really help build a data society.

I highly recommend taking time to read about some of the healthcare concepts drawn up by students on the Intel-sponsored Innovation Design and Engineering Master programme in conjunction between Imperial College and the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in our ‘Future Health, Future Cities’ series of blogs. For sustainable cities, the work done at Teratec will allow us to predict trends and help mitigate the risks associated with the expectation that more than 2/3rds of the world's population living in big cities by 2050.

So far, we have seen research into solutions curtailed from both a technical and knowledge aspect but we look forward to overcoming these challenges with partners at Teratec in the coming years. We know there are significant breakthroughs to be made as we push towards providing personalized medicine at the bedside. Only then can we truly say we are forging ahead to build a future for healthcare that matches the future demands of our cities.

Further Reading:

• The Data Stack: Big Data Solutions Inside, Further Sustainability Outside
• Changing Data Landscape: Leverage Healthcare Big Data for a Better Care Environment
• Press Coverage: Intel sets up big data lab in Europe to push real-world trials

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