Brunel University

The University plans to create a centre of excellence (BITlab) in eScience and multimedia research. It will contribute to UK GRID initiatives as a part of the London eScience Consortium, which includes Brunel, Birkbeck College, Imperial College, Royal Holloway, University College, and Queen Mary College. eScience is a £98M government initiative encouraging "science increasingly done through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet, using very large data collections, terascale computing resources and high performance visualisation."

The Centre will be used by Departments throughout the University - Design, Electronic and Computer Engineering, Information Systems & Computing, Mechanical Engineering, Systems Engineering, Business and Management, Economics, Human Sciences, Performing Arts, Biological Sciences, and Mathematical Sciences. The synergy and potential for collaboration between science, engineering and arts is a key feature of this new centre.

Typical projects include - virtual reconstruction of ancient worlds, visualisation of developing embryos, computational fluid dynamics, analysis of data from particle detector systems, research into eBusiness technology, use of virtual reality in design, use of digital technology in the performing arts. The Centre will operate a financial dealing room to enable studies in experimental economics and support the newly formed Risk Centre which is a collaborative initiative between Economics, Mathematical Sciences and Human Sciences.