Data Science Institute UM takes part in national consortium

The Maastricht University Institute of Data Science (IDS) is a participant in ODISSEI (the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations), which received €9 million from The Dutch Research Council (NWO Dutch: Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek) to accelerate the development of computational social sciences in the Netherlands over the next five years.

IDS will lead the research on applying privacy-preserving distributed computing, which is widely used in health research, to the social sciences. For example, educational data that is highly federated and stored securely in hundreds of individual schools can be analyzed without the need to collect and centralize the data. This allows individuals to remain anonymous, lets institutions maintain their commitments to responsible data use, and enables researchers to reveal the social value in the data. IDS will undertake extensive prototyping and testing in order to ensure that data sharing can be done safely and securely.

"We're thrilled to be part of the ODISSEI consortium to advance social science research”, Professor Michel Dumontier states. “Our contribution will focus on developing new methods and infrastructure to construct predictive models from multiple sites in a secure and trustworthy manner. Our work will directly build on our National Research Agenda (NWO/NWA) funded collaboration with Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and The Maastricht Study (DMS), in which we examined factors that contributed to determinants of Type-II diabetes through a combination of novel technologies and governance models. Together with our new collaborators, we look forward to gaining a better understanding of the nature and evolution of Dutch society." 

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