The Intelligent Modelling & Analysis Research Group (IMA)

Over the last five years, the IMA group has established itself as a unique brand in the UK for end-to-end data modelling and analysis. We are a highly inter-disciplinary research group focusing on the development of models and techniques for real-world and multifaceted problems in data analysis. Our application areas centre on the domains of biomedical sciences and themes relevant to the digital economy including security, energy management and adaptive systems. We encompass researchers from a variety of backgrounds including computer science, the biomedical sciences, operational research, mathematics, statistics and complexity science.  The group currently has seven permanent academics, two support staff, ten research staff and over 40 Marie Curie Fellows and PhD students. We hold over £33m in current external research funding and have led a further £6m of completed projects.

The IMA Research Vision

We believe that understanding a challenging real-world problem, modelling the problem and analysing it are closely-coupled, integrated aspects that are all of fundamental importance. Often several feedback cycles (including reformulation of the problem statement) are required in order to deliver genuinely useful solutions. Our research vision is to establish sophisticated intelligent modelling techniques for the purpose of analysing data that is noisy, complex and grounded in real-world practical applications. Our ultimate goal is to create new and enhance existing modelling and analysis techniques, and to translate these into usable tools to enable end-users to intelligently select and analyse ever-larger scale data in a world of increasingly complex problems.

This philosophy leads to our unique end-to-end approach to data analysis: We not only model the application domains, but we also model the techniques themselves in order to create a holistic view of the problems. To undertake this world-leading research, we use a range of techniques including AI-based Data Mining, Bio-Inspired Algorithms, Computational Modelling, Discrete and Agent-Based Simulation, Fuzzy Methodologies, Medical Image Analysis, Multi-Sensor Data Fusion and Qualitative Methods including Structured Interviews.

IMA's main research objectives are:

    1. Modelling and representation of challenging problems, with particular emphasis on biomedical and digital economy application domains;
    2. Creating cutting-edge analysis methodologies, both for general purposes and specifically tailored to our main application domains;
    3. Focussing on difficult, challenging and important real-world problems, with particular emphasis on large and noisy data sets.
        IMA