The Alan Turing Institute
2016/2017 in numbers
The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom national institute for data sciences, founded in 2015. It is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computing pioneer. In the academic year 2016/2017, the institute hired its first Research Fellows, published over recorded talks, over academic publications and started new research projects that advance the fields of data science, machine learning and many more.
Here, we present information about the Alan Turing Institute in a fun interactive way. We are using tools developed as part of The Gamma project, which make it possible to present data transparently. Behind every number and every chart on this page, there is source code that links the chart to the primary data source and lets you check the data and explore further. For example, if you want to verify that the Institute hosted events during the year, click on the number to see the raw data from which it is calculated!
The interactive visualizations on this page are inspired by the You Draw It series by New York Times and let you make your own guess about the data before showing the actual numbers. To make this more fun, we calculate a score that tells you how good your guesses are! When you are done, share the results with us at @turinginst. How many of the facts about the Alan Turing Institute can you guess correctly?
I don't like games. Just show me the correct results on all interactive charts.
Play again. Reset all guesses on the interactive charts. I want to try again!
Share your score. Tell the world how you did! Don't worry, this is just for fun.
People at the Alan Turing Institute
People at the Turing
The Alan Turing Institute hosts over academics and students. The members listed on the Turing web page, include Research Fellows who work full-time at the institute, Turing Fellows who divide their time between the host university and the instiute and Doctoral Students. We also counted members of the Research Engineering team who work with researchers to produce practical software.
Can you guess how many Research Fellows, Turing Fellows, Doctoral Students and members of the Research Engineering team are there?
Fellows from partner universities
The Turing Fellows are based at one of the partner universities and have a part-time appointment at the Alan Turing Institute. This can range from one day a month to several days a week and each university prefers different arrangements.
Can you guess which university has the largest number of Turing Fellows affiliated with the Alan Turing Institute?
Talks recorded at the Alan Turing Institute
The Alan Turing Institute published over YouTube videos that have a total watch time of minutes. Videos from the Fellow Short Talks series feature the current research of the Research Fellows and Falculty Fellows. The Turing Lectures series contains invited talks from researchers across the world. The chart below shows the aggregate number of video views for all the talks posted on YouTube.
Note that the chart below is calculated from a data dump from YouTube and so you can click on any of the numbers quoted in the previous paragraph, or on the "view source code" link, and explore the data on your own. Try changing the number of views to the number of subscribers!
When are videos published
Let's now have a more detailed look at the YouTube video views. The bubble chart shows when each video was published together with the total number of views since it was published.
You can see huge spike in activity around October 2016 when regular talk series started and then a break around Christmas 2016. Since then, activity has been more regular.
Now the game part! The line chart below shows total video views per day. This jumps up and down, so the line chart shows average values over two weeks. Can you guess the rest of the line?
Selected Turing videos
Now, let's look at a couple of individual lectures. The following list contains a number of talks (selected by hand) that illustrate the breadth of the topics covered by the institute. You can explore and select other talks if you click "open source code".
- Ethics in the Age of Information
- High-Dimensional Learning
- The Data Science of Politics
- Open Data-Driven Storytelling
- What is data science?
The game part is, can you assign the talks to the bars in the chart by the number of their views? To do this, click on a talk title and then click on a bar where you think it should be!
Events at the Alan Turing Institute
The Alan Turing Institute hosted over events. Those include Turing Lectures, which feature lectures by prominent researchers visiting the institute, Fellow Short Talks where Turing researchers introduce their work, smaller informal workshops where new collaborations are initiated and also a range of events for students. In total, number of visits for all events hosted at the institute was over . Note that we do not track individual visitors, so if you attended two events, you will be counted twice.
The following chart gives an overview of the events. The institute started hosting early scoping workshops between December 2015 and continued throughout 2016. A lot more activity started once the institute officially opened in October 2016.
How many people come
As you can see in the following chart, the two most common kinds of events hosted at the institute are workshops and lectures. Since the institute was established, it hosted lectures and workshops. The number of short talks and larger conferences was smaller.
The total number of visitors to any of the events was , but the fun question for you is to guess how is the number of visits distributed between different kinds of events?
In the following interactive visualization, you can try to guess! You need to guess the total number of visits to all the short talks, conferences, workshops and lectures, respectively.
Largest Turing events
Turing Lectures often attract a large number of guests. The largest one had over visitors, but the next four closely follow the lead. You can view the recordings of many of the biggest events on YouTube, including four of the top five. Here, they are in alphabethic order:
- AI and Public Services
- Data Science for Medicine
- Data Science, National Security and Systems Challenges (not recorded)
- Multi-Agent Learning at DeepMind
- Smarter Cities
As with the YouTube videos before, can you assign the events to their bars based on the number of attendees? Click on the event and then on the bar where you think it should be!
Explore the data on your own
This article is built using The Gamma, which makes it possible to present data in a transparent and open way. This means that you can access the raw data behind the visualization and check that it is used correctly. You can do this for any visualziation on the page by clicking on the "open source code" link. To make it easier, you can also use the editor below. Select any of the samples, edit the code and hit "Run and show" to see the results!