Research in Informatics promises to take information technology to a new level, and to place information at the heart of 21st-century science, technology and society – University of Edinburgh.

Nowadays we are surrounded by systems that constantly collect information about movements and on-going events; satellites, cash transactions, GPS tracking, telescopes, sensors and cameras all record huge amounts of data.

Information can in turn be extracted from the above, using data mining and exploration techniques. Throughout the past year I was reading for an MSc in Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

This MSc specialises in the study of techniques available for the understanding of data, and extraction of new pieces of information from data repositories.

These techniques are useful in areas such as Decision Support Systems through prediction and classification, marketing products to the right customers through recommender systems, event detection through trend analysis and data summarisation through statistics and feature extraction.

In my dissertation I opted to focus on a huge repository of data containing observations of our universe, collected by cosmologists through satellites, telescopes and recorded readings.

Cosmologists build models that try to explain the shape, contents and the relationships governing the expansion and gravitational forces in the universe. By comparing this data to a particular ‘universe model’, one can measure how similar the model is to the universe as we know it.

My dissertation developed new methods for finding which model is most similar to our observed universe, and how similarity varies with changes in the universe model.

This study helps cosmologists understand our universe and test different theories on the creation and forces governing our universe.

The application of this dissertation is not solely linked to cosmology. In industry models exist in areas such as biology, construction, economics and sustainable development where such techniques are also applicable.

This MSc was carried out following the award of a STEPS scholarship. The scholarship is part-financed by the European Union – European Social Fund under Operational Programme II – Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, “Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life”.

I wish to thank the scholarship board for choosing me to benefit from these funds, without which I surely would not have been able to complete my studies in a course and university which are so inspiring and recognised.