About us

The mission of the Imperial Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data Intensive Science is to train a new generation of scientists and data engineers with the data analysis skills to perform cutting edge research in fundamental physics and link these activities to industry areas where data intensive analysis methods can make significant impact.

It offers access to an exceptional breadth of leading edge science areas, an excellent training programme with unique elements, and a diverse range of fully integrated partners both across the UK and internationally. The CDT consists of research academics across four research groups within the Department of Physics at Imperial College London, the Astrophysics, High Energy Physics, Space and Atmospheric Physics and Theoretical Physics groups.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for understanding data is growing across multiple areas in scientific research and industry. The challenges faced by research in fundamental physics, combined with both the very large datasets and data rates, have made, and continue to make, these fields a unique development ground for ML and AI generally.

As well as leading developments in their own fields, academics from the CDT research groups are responsible for three interdisciplinary research centres in the natural sciences at Imperial College:

• Big Data and Machine Learning in the Natural Sciences
• The Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology
• Centre for High-Throughput Digital Electronics and Machine Learning

These centres serve as hubs of activity for research across a wide range of fields that share common data-science needs. In addition, members of the CDT research groups participate in the Imperial College Artificial Intelligence Network and have strong connections to I-X.