KNOWLEDGE SPECIAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & BIG DATA
LEADING CANCER RESEARCH Amsterdam has been a globally recognised hub of cancer expertise for more than a century, and in the process has devised impressive ways of translating knowledge from the lab into real solutions for patients as quickly as possible. Many established oncological research institutes call Amsterdam home, such as the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the VUmc Cancer Center Amsterdam and the Oncologic Research Centre AMC. Together they employ nearly 9,000 people and produce around 4,000 scientific articles every year. These institutions have recently united to create the Oncology Graduate School Amsterdam, training the new experts working on tomorrow’s cures and treatments. In this way, Amsterdam is bringing these researchers closer together, fostering a true sense of community with shared goals. This is the strength of this city, and why two science parks were created: the Amsterdam Science Park and the Medical Business Park. Together they promote the integration of the oncological research emerging from GRANTING GREATER VISION TO AI Amsterdam’s research institutions into the work of the A new computer-vision lab in the Amsterdam Science Park is reaping the fruits of a collaboration between Amsterdam’s companies that can best use it. Each park offers companies space to work alongside the various scientific institutes university and industry sectors. The QUVA lab is a joint and faculties, removing geographical obstacles to effective research laboratory recently opened by American tech collaboration. The Innovation Exchange Amsterdam is giant Qualcomm and the UvA. The new lab, dedicated to another organisation that brings the accumulated knowledge machine-learning techniques, is an extension of ongoing academic research in the field. Professor Arnold Smeulders, of these institutes together, helping them bring their scientific discoveries to the greater public. who studies and teaches computer vision at the UvA, is One vivid example of the benefits of this integrated approach excited to see the ways in which this once-obscure topic is is the newly established Hartwig Medical Foundation, a increasingly relevant to industry and daily life. Amsterdam database of tumour DNA that will promote new cancer has a proud history in this area, and the researchers at the treatments and refine current methods. Another recent QUVA lab are now combining research from various fields success story is thromboDx, a molecular diagnostics to advance our understanding of ‘deep vision’ technologies. company established in 2012 to utilise Dr. Tom Würdinger’s The hope is to achieve new breakthroughs in, for example, facial recognition, motion sensing and the analysis of security ground-breaking research in neuro-oncology at the VUmc CCA. Dr Ton Schumacher and his colleagues at the footage. Netherlands Cancer Institute have also been developing tailor-made treatments to help the body fight cancer. Finally, BUILDING QUANTUM SECURITY the T-Cell Factory was established in 2014 (and later QuSoft is the Netherlands’ first research centre devoted to quantum software. It focuses on developing software that can acquired by Kite Pharma) to manage the relevant patents and intellectual property. take advantage of the massive power offered by tomorrow’s quantum computers. The lab – a joint initiative of the VU, COLLABORATING ON NEUROSCIENCE the UvA and the Center for Mathematics and Computer Amsterdam Neuroscience is a new research organisation Science (CWI) – was opened in the Amsterdam Science that brings together the city’s top hospitals and universities. Park in late 2015. It is the brainchild of Harry Buhrman, Focusing on Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease a professor of computer science at the UvA. He likens the and other forms of dementia, it will be one of the largest current situation with quantum computing to the 1960s, neuroscience research communities in Europe. The group is when there was all manner of new computer hardware also forging business relationships with external stakeholders, but a lack of clear uses for it. QuSoft, which will focus on from public-private partnerships to research alliances – a fields such as encryption, builds on the excellent reputation shining example of Amsterdam’s collaboration mission. of the Amsterdam institutions involved, strengthening the Netherlands’ position as a world-class centre of quantum computing. TAMING BIG-DATA ENERGY DEMANDS How do we deal with the growing amount of energy that Big Data consumes? According to Dr Patricia Lago, the head of Software and Services at the VU, the growing data sector now uses about 10% of the world’s electricity, and that amount is growing quickly.Yet many companies haven’t considered how they will deal with their future data demands, which partly explains why today’s datacentres use only 20-80% of their storage capacity. Dr Lago and her team at the VU’s Green Lab work on ways of reducing the amount of energy that data storage systems use, developing smart software that can accurately predict how much capacity will be needed. This is especially urgent in Amsterdam, which is now home to a third of all European data centres. Collaborating with industry players is critical to continued success in this field.
102 AMS
LIFE SCIENCES & HEALTH