State of Baden-Württemberg Grants 1.1 Million Euros for New Science Data Centre
Research
The University of Mannheim and the ZEW – Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research receive more than one million euros of funding from the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science within the framework of the state governments’ digitalisation strategy “digital@bw”. The research grant will be used to launch a high-performance science data centre.
Digitalisation has penetrated virtually every aspect of day-to-day life and work: people are increasingly using social networks and messenger services to communicate with one another; they do their shopping online; and they use their iPads to read the newspaper in the morning. Companies are also becoming more and more digital, for instance, in the areas of production, logistics and customer communication. This produces an ever-increasing amount of data in a variety of different formats – which is of interest for scientific research.
The University of Mannheim and ZEW now receive a 1.1 million euro grant for the launch of a high-performing research data centre in the field of business and economic sciences. The goal of the Mannheim Business and Economic Research Data Center (BERD) is to make the increasing amount of data more accessible and usable. BERD is one of four science data centres to receive a three-year grant from the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg in the context of the digitalisation strategy “digital@bw”. The consortium of BERD consists of researchers from ZEW, the Mannheim Center for Data Science, the Mannheim University Library and the computing centre of the University of Mannheim.
“The connection of science and infrastructure is what makes this project so special,” explains Dr. Sabine Gehrlein, director of the university library. “For the first time, researchers and representatives of the faculties, the library, the computing and data centres come together to develop a new plan for data availability and data analysis in business and economic sciences,” says Gehrlein. Being one of the most research-intensive universities in the realms of economics and social sciences, the University of Mannheim is particularly well-suited for this task. Florian Stahl, professor at the University of Mannheim’s Business School, adds: “Thanks to the new science data centre, the University of Mannheim will have the opportunity to connect activities in the area of data science, to expand its range of courses on new methods on the use of structured and unstructured data, and to explore new insights for consumers and firms, for the economy and society, with the help of big data.”
“The research grant comes at exactly the right time”
The goal of the science data centre is to combine the highly fragmented data available in the economic sciences, and facilitate access to this data through an intelligent search tool. The data sets range from historic, printed stock market data, tax data or economic surveys that first have to be made available in a digital form, to digital data sets on social media communication, online advertising or the administration of customer relations. “The research grant by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science comes exactly at the right time. This will help us make the leap to a new generation of methods for collecting and analysing research data on businesses,” explains Dr. Georg Licht, head of the ZEW Research Department “Economics of Innovation and Industrial Dynamics”. Licht goes on to explain: “The funding enables ZEW to significantly expand its research regarding the use of artificial intelligence, big data and text analysis in order to collect and analyse firm-level data.”
Another important objective of BERD is to develop innovative methods on how to work and deal with this data. How should the different data formats such as texts, pictures or videos be stored and used? The new science data centre will also expand the range of educational and further training possibilities. This will provide students with the necessary methodological expertise to correctly evaluate the data generated and develop new insights from it. “The new courses will not only be offered as on-site classes; they will also be made available to students who are not in Mannheim via the ‘International Program for Survey and Data Science’, an online platform for further education that we have developed in cooperation with the University of Maryland in the past few years,” explains Professor Frauke Kreuter.
In order to set up this new infrastructure, the University of Mannheim and ZEW have established a strategic network of connections with partners like the Deutsche Bundesbank, the German Data Forum and the universities of Hamburg and Cologne.
For more information please contact:
Dr. Georg Licht, Phone +49 (0)621/1235-177, E-mail georg.licht@zew.de