Peter Grindrod

Last updated

Peter Grindrod, CBE is a British mathematician.

Career

Grindrod was appointed a CBE in 2005 for services to mathematics R&D. [1] [2] He is a former member of the EPSRC Council (2000–04) and chair of the EPSRC's User Panel. He is a former president of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, the UK's professional and learned society for mathematicians (2006–08). He is also former member of BBSRC Council (2009–13). [3] He is a former independent member of the MOD DSAC (2008–13). He was one of the founding directors (trustees) of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national centre for Data Science and AI.

Contents

He is active in considering novel ways to achieve higher impact from the UK's research and development programmes and he has written recently on the intrinsic lack of risk-taking within public R&D funding, due to wrong-framing of proposed projects (as individual bets, all judged absolutely and seeking success, rather than as a portfolio of investments of very distinct types and distinct levels of risks and possible returns); and the dead hand of consensual peer-review processes, which results in only rather safe-science (de-risked) being funded and avoids any investments where there is controversy or a lack of a reviewer consensus (which could indicate disruptive opportunities outside of the present paradigm). He has recently applied such thinking to the MOD's AI programme, the UK's national AI strategy and portfolio, and the forthcoming UK ARIA. [4]

Grindrod began working in the theory and application of reaction diffusion equations. He obtained a degree in maths from the University of Bristol (1981) and a PhD from the University of Dundee (1983), after which followed a short period of post doctoral research in dynamical systems and nonlinear PDEs at Dundee. Between 1984 and 1989 he worked at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, largely on both applications and modelling within physiology and biology.

In 1989 he joined a commercial consulting company working in the environmental sciences, building up a mathematical modelling group on multidisciplinary projects in the UK, Europe, US and Japan. His research ranged from the application of fractals to simulating subsurface environments (micro medium structure controlling channelling flow and dispersion phenomena at the macroscopic scale), and non-linear multiphase (solutes, gases, and especially colloidal) dispersion processes, fully coupled chemical-temperature–hydration systems, through to the development of frameworks for estimating uncertainties within risk assessments, and the analysis of public risk perception.

He has developed models and methods for analyzing large networks (range dependent random graphs) occurring within the biosciences, such as in genome, proteome and metabolome interactions. He is interested in applications of mathematics to phenomena in the Digital Economy, and within neurodynamics. He is working on methods for analysing very large and evolving graphs/networks, including forecasting, inference and intervention problems. These have applications to large communication (telco, email social) networks – especially in monitoring marketing and intervention applications (including CT, cyber, and radicalisation modelling).

In 1998 he was co-founder and Technical Director of a start–up company, Numbercraft Limited, supplying services and software to retailers and consumer goods manufacturers. The need to extract structure and information, rapidly, and exhaustively, from large commercial data sets drove this. He worked with all of the major grocery retailers in the UK and their largest suppliers. Numbercraft, designed as a five-year project, was acquired by Lawson Software (St Paul, US) in 2003.

Around 2010, he was a co-founder of Cignifi Inc, based in Boston MA, developing behaviour based credit scoring methods for mobile Network Operators' (MNO's) customers, depending on their individual call data records over a just a few weeks. Cignifi operates within a number of counties, in partnerships with MNOs wishing to extend mobile bang to include loans, insurance es and other financial products.

Grindrod is also active in advising digital marketing companies, on their use of social network analytics.

He advises on technologies and methods that can use transactional (behavioural) data rather than traditional credit scoring methods (as many companies are thin file/no file).

He is also a champion of agent based simulation as a means of modelling and forecasting global marine trade and transport at a fundamental level. Maritime players are in increasingly dependent on such data science and he chairs a start-up, GTT Analytics Ltd, within this sector.

He founded an Oxford start-up, Hare Analytics Limited, in 2020 to provide analytics to the sports and sports betting sectors. Amongst other things Hare aims to reduce problem gambling and identify accounts that may develop problems before they actually do so.

Grindrod is a professor of mathematics at the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford (2013– ). [5] He is an expert in science and technology funding strategy and in increasing the appetite for risk and high impact public programmes. In 2020 he wrote a short book "Leading within Digital Worlds: Strategic Management for Data Science" for people who need to lead data science or AI research groups or ventures.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer science</span> Study of computation

Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines to applied disciplines.

Computational archaeology is a subfield of digital archeology that focuses on the analysis and interpretation of archaeological data using advanced computational techniques. This field employs data modeling, statistical analysis, and computer simulations to understand and reconstruct past human behaviors and societal developments. By leveraging Geographic Information Systems (GIS), predictive modeling, and various simulation tools, computational archaeology enhances the ability to process complex archaeological datasets, providing deeper insights into historical contexts and cultural heritage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer simulation</span> Process of mathematical modelling, performed on a computer

Computer simulation is the running of a mathematical model on a computer, the model being designed to represent the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be determined by comparing their results to the real-world outcomes they aim to predict. Computer simulations have become a useful tool for the mathematical modeling of many natural systems in physics, astrophysics, climatology, chemistry, biology and manufacturing, as well as human systems in economics, psychology, social science, health care and engineering. Simulation of a system is represented as the running of the system's model. It can be used to explore and gain new insights into new technology and to estimate the performance of systems too complex for analytical solutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Institute of Mathematics and its Applications</span> UK professional body

The Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) is the UK's chartered professional body for mathematicians and one of the UK's learned societies for mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isaac Newton Institute</span> International research institute

The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences is an international research institute for mathematics and its many applications at the University of Cambridge. It is named after one of the university's most illustrious figures, the mathematician and natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton, and occupies one of the buildings in the Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

E-Science or eScience is computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments, or science that uses immense data sets that require grid computing; the term sometimes includes technologies that enable distributed collaboration, such as the Access Grid. The term was created by John Taylor, the Director General of the United Kingdom's Office of Science and Technology in 1999 and was used to describe a large funding initiative starting in November 2000. E-science has been more broadly interpreted since then, as "the application of computer technology to the undertaking of modern scientific investigation, including the preparation, experimentation, data collection, results dissemination, and long-term storage and accessibility of all materials generated through the scientific process. These may include data modeling and analysis, electronic/digitized laboratory notebooks, raw and fitted data sets, manuscript production and draft versions, pre-prints, and print and/or electronic publications." In 2014, IEEE eScience Conference Series condensed the definition to "eScience promotes innovation in collaborative, computationally- or data-intensive research across all disciplines, throughout the research lifecycle" in one of the working definitions used by the organizers. E-science encompasses "what is often referred to as big data [which] has revolutionized science... [such as] the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN... [that] generates around 780 terabytes per year... highly data intensive modern fields of science...that generate large amounts of E-science data include: computational biology, bioinformatics, genomics" and the human digital footprint for the social sciences.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to universities in the United Kingdom. EPSRC research areas include mathematics, physics, chemistry, artificial intelligence and computer science, but exclude particle physics, nuclear physics, space science and astronomy. Since 2018 it has been part of UK Research and Innovation, which is funded through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marcus du Sautoy</span> British mathematician (born 1965)

Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popular science books. He was previously a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Wadham College, Oxford and served as president of the Mathematical Association, an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) senior media fellow, and a Royal Society University Research Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Kell</span> British biochemist


Douglas Bruce Kell is a British biochemist and Professor of Systems Biology in the Institute of Systems, Molecular and Integrative Biology at the University of Liverpool. He was previously at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, based in the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB) where he founded and led the Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology (MCISB). He served as chief executive officer (CEO) of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) from 2008 to 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Heritage science</span> Cross-disciplinary scientific research of cultural heritage

Heritage science is the interdisciplinary domain of scientific study of cultural and natural heritage. Heritage science draws on diverse humanities, sciences and engineering disciplines. It focuses on enhancing the understanding, care and sustainable use of heritage so it can enrich people's lives, both today and in the future. Heritage science is an umbrella term encompassing all forms of scientific enquiry into human works and the combined works of nature and humans, of value to people.

Discovery Net is one of the earliest examples of a scientific workflow system allowing users to coordinate the execution of remote services based on Web service and Grid Services standards. The system was designed and implemented at Imperial College London as part of the Discovery Net pilot project funded by the UK e-Science Programme. Many of the concepts pioneered by Discovery Net have been later incorporated into a variety of other scientific workflow systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David De Roure</span> English computer scientist

David Charles De Roure is an English computer scientist who is a professor of e-Research at the University of Oxford, where he is responsible for Digital Humanities in The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and is a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. He is a supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Oxford Martin School Senior Alumni Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David T. Jones (biochemist)</span> British bioinformatician

David Tudor Jones is a Professor of Bioinformatics, and Head of Bioinformatics Group in the University College London. He is also the director in Bloomsbury Center for Bioinformatics, which is a joint Research Centre between UCL and Birkbeck, University of London and which also provides bioinformatics training and support services to biomedical researchers. In 2013, he is a member of editorial boards for PLoS ONE, BioData Mining, Advanced Bioinformatics, Chemical Biology & Drug Design, and Protein: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Delpy</span> British bioengineer

David Thomas Delpy,, is a British bioengineer, and Hamamatsu Professor of Medical Photonics, at University College London.

Simon Tavaré is a British researcher who is the founding Director of the Herbert and Florence Irving Institute of Cancer Dynamics at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he was Director of the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, Professor of Cancer Research at the Department of Oncology and Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge.

Peter John Diggle, is a British statistician. He holds concurrent appointments with the Faculty of Health and Medicine at Lancaster University, and the Institute of Infection and Global Health at the University of Liverpool. From 2004 to 2008 he was an EPSRC Senior Research Fellow. He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Biostatistics.

Melissa Hanna-Brown is a British pharmacologist. She works for Pfizer UK and is a visiting professor at the University of Warwick.

Marina Denise Anne Jirotka is professor of human-centered computing at the University of Oxford, director of the Responsible Technology Institute, governing body fellow at St Cross College, board member of the Society for Computers and Law and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. She leads a team that works on responsible innovation, in a range of ICT fields including robotics, AI, machine learning, quantum computing, social media and the digital economy. She is known for her work with Alan Winfield on the 'Ethical Black Box'. A proposal that robots using AI should be fitted with a type of inflight recorder, similar to those used by aircraft, to track the decisions and actions of the AI when operating in an uncontrolled environment and to aid in post-accident investigations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sadie Creese</span> British cybersecurity specialist

Sadie Creese is a British cybersecurity specialist. She is Professor of Cybersecurity in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, Director of the Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre at the Oxford Martin School, co-director of the university's Cyber Security Centre and of the Martin School's Institute for the Future of Computing, and a fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

The UK Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (ITRC) was established in January 2011. The ITRC provides data and modelling to help governments, policymakers and other stakeholders in infrastructure make more sustainable and resilient infrastructure decisions. It is a collaboration between seven universities and more than 55 partners from infrastructure policy and practice.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.