Lab: Happy 5th Birthday to us!
The Lab is five years old … and yes, it really is ok, no hard feelings, we know it is not your fault you couldn’t make it to the party but, hey, it is never to late to sing Happy Birthday!
It is an anniversary worth celebrating too as many things have happened and changed in the last five years: Cloud Compute became mainstream, humans are no longer best at Go, Natural Language Processing Assistants are everywhere, Virtual Reality had ups and downs (and so did Brexit), schools went on strike for climate, a virus hit the world …
The Lab went through it all and we are still doing what we originally intended: to make environmental data and science useful through a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, technologists and designers.
We continue to work with many people inside and outside the Met Office … As we speak, we are working with Google DeepMind on the development of Machine Learning algorithms for nowcasting; with Microsoft and the Alan Turing Institute to create scalable platforms for data science; with the University of Exeter to help businesses in the South West and to train a new generation of international, multi- disciplinary research scientists as part of the Environmental Intelligence Centre for Doctoral Training …
In the past we have created open competitions with Alibaba; organised TEDand international conferences such as the Google and Mozilla sponsored Graphical Web 2016; worked with other National Meteorology Services (BoM, MET Norway, SMHI, JMA); hosted MPs and numerous VIP visits; won awards by the UK IT Industry for our work on AI; run hackathons for the London Design Week and NASA Space Apps; created bots, virtual reality applications, mobile apps …. We even co-created the Lost Weekend Music/Art/Tech/Ideas Festival with Exeter City Council that attracted more than 6,000 people!
It is busy, difficult and fun. More than anything, the Lab is about the people working in the Lab and with the Lab, so thank you very much to all past and present members, collaborators and friends for the last five years.
Looking forward to doing much more together in the future!
Alberto Arribas
Head of Informatics Lab
