MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) prestige addition with big-data laboratory at Adelaide's Lot Fourteen
BankSA and Optus were major partners, with South Australian government involvement, in the MIT big data living laboratory at Lot Fourteen.
The world’s leading university in computer science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), became an integral part of Adelaide city’s Lot Fourteen technology and space hub from 2019 by establishing a living laboratory to crunch big data and develop popular products.
The MIT living laboratory at Lot Fourteen was envisaged to drive innovation by crunching huge amounts of data. Students, researchers and commercial interests will trawl through data from mobile phones, banking services, government transactions, GPS tracking, satellite imagery and other sources.
Working with partners BankSA, Optus, DSpark and the South Australian government,the laboratory would guide government decisions and develop products with commercial outcomes. The living lab would be an incubator, identifying where opportunities were and having young people involved to take their chance to build a business or partnership of big business.
BankSA and Optus were major funders of the MIT big data living lab project and moved staff into the laboratory in the old allied health building on Lot Fourteen’s former Royal Adelaide Hospital site on North Terrace. MIT would rotate researchers and students through Adelaide and would work with the three main South Australian universities on projects and establish exchange programs for students between the United States and Adelaide.
MIT professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland said Adelaide was chosen for the big data living laboratory “due to its leadership in data analytics and machine learning”.
MIT, one of the world’s most successful creators of high-tech business, had companies spawned from its computer research generating revenue of $US2 trillion a year. Established in 1861 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT had 90 Nobel laureates. Its scientists or graduates were responsible for the world-changing inventions including the world wide web, email, the transistor radio, robots, technicolour and the first video game.
