In a wide range of specialist areas – such as astronomy, neuroscience, archaeology, history and economics – experts need to make sense of and find meaning in very large and complex data sets. Finding meaningful patterns in these large data sets is challenging. By comparison, looking for a needle in a haystack could seem pretty simple! Foraging for meaning in large data sets is a bottleneck that is becoming more challenging as scientific research creates and works with bigger and bigger data sets (the data deluge).
And it’s not just scientists who are affected. In everyday life, we are confronted by increasingly complex environments requiring difficult decisions and rapid responses; think of trying to get the shopping done at the supermarket in a rush. CEEDS will provide new tools for ‘human-computer interaction’ that will assist our everyday decision making and information foraging.