Dr Kai Sun

Dr Kai Sun is the Institute Manager of the Data Science Institute (DSI) at Imperial College London. Her research interests include translational data management, network analysis and blockchain-based decentralised systems.

She received MSc degree and PhD degree in Computer Science from Imperial College London in 2010 and 2014 respectively. From 2014 to 2017, she was a Research Associate at the DSI, working on EU IMI projects including the Unbiased BIOmarkers in PREDiction of respiratory disease outcomes (UBIOPRED) project and the European Translational Information and Knowledge Management Services (eTRIKS) project. From 2017 to 2018, she was the Centre Manager of the HNA Centre of Future Data Ecosystem, responsible for managing blockchain related research projects.

She served as the local chair of the International Conference on Brain Informatics and Health (BIH 2015), local chair of the 24th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2018) and the organizing chair of the 1st International Conference on Mathematical Research for Blockchain Economy (MARBLE 2019).

IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON AND THE DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTE

Consistently rated amongst the world's best universities (3^rd in Europe and 7^th in the World, QS World University Rankings 2022), Imperial College London is a science-based institution with an international reputation for excellence in teaching and research. Imperial attracts over 19,000 students and 8,000 staff of the highest international quality from over 136 different countries.  Imperial has recently been named University of the Year 2022 by The Times and Sunday Times’ Good University Guide.

Since its foundation in 1907, Imperial's contributions to society have included the discovery of penicillin, the development of holography and the foundations of fibre optics. This commitment to the application of research for the benefit of all continues today, with current areas of focus including interdisciplinary collaborations to improve global health, tackle climate change, develop sustainable sources of energy, address security challenges, develop data management and analysis technologiesfor supporting data driven research, and tackling problems at molecular scale.

Imperial’s Centre for Continuing Professional Development had extensive experience in developing and running a range of online summer schools for undergraduate students.  We draw on Imperial’s education pedagogy in online learning to design and deliver summer schools that provide an engaging learning experience for students.  Various interactive applications are used to support live teaching, online group projects are designed to assess students’ learning outcomes and virtual social platform created in Flipgrip will provide students with a networking environment.

The Data Science Institute (DSI) is a major Imperial College London initiative that brings together Imperial’s existing data science activities and expertise, and provides a focus and a catalyst for new partnerships.

The DSI supports multidisciplinary collaborations between the College’s academic experts in many disciplines such as healthcare, financial services, climate science, and city infrastructure to create solutions to complex problems. Alongside research, the Institute fosters the next generation of data scientists and engineers by developing a range of postgraduate and executive courses.

The DSI includes 7 Academic Labs, has attracted over £50m in funding for data science research, technology and infrastructure and has published over 300 papers.

The Institute’s Data Observatory (DO) was one of the first and largest visualisation suites in Europe. It provides a multi-dimensional and immersive environment to analyse large and complex data sets and to work collaboratively.

Thanks to its many research collaborations both across College and with a variety of external academic and industrial partners, the DSI is establishing its role as an international hub in data science.

Introduction