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Researchers have observed the process of evolution by natural selection at work in robots, by constructing a ‘mother’ robot that can design, build and test its own ‘children’, and then use the results to improve the performance of the next generation, without relying on computer simulation or human intervention. 

National institute for the development and use of advanced mathematics, computer science, algorithms and ‘Big Data’ has announced its first director, and will start research activities in the autumn. 

What power can individuals have over their data when their every move online is being tracked? Researchers at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory are building new systems that shift the power back to individual users, and could make personal data faster to access and at much lower cost.

Researchers are using social media data to build a picture of the personalities of millions, changing core ideas of how psychological profiling works. They say it could revolutionise employment and commerce, but the work must be done transparently.

Researchers have developed a new technique that trawls the enormous amounts of public procurement data now available across the EU to highlight unscrupulous uses of public funds: from national and regional levels to individual contracts, companies and politicians.

When is a rare disease not a rare disease? ̽»¨Ö±²¥answer: when big data gets involved. An ambitious new research project aims to show patients that they are not alone.

With more information than ever at our fingertips, statisticians are vital to innumerable fields and industries. Welcome to the world of the datarati, where humans and machines team up to crunch the numbers.

We live in an age of near-total surveillance. In a talk given earlier this week, Professor Jon Crowcroft argued that total surveillance of society is toxic, and that those who claim that ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear’ are helping perpetuate a massive power imbalance which is doing harm to society.

Dr Finbarr Livesey –  ̽»¨Ö±²¥ lecturer and Deputy Director of the MPhil in Public Policy – submitted research to Parliament’s recent report on digital democracy. Here, he discusses the report’s implications for the democratic process in the UK.

Private information would be much more secure if individuals moved away from cloud-based storage towards peer-to-peer systems, where data is stored in a variety of ways and across a variety of sites, argues a ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Cambridge researcher.