The Universitat de València obtains one of the 5 grants of the BBVA Foundation to R&D teams on Big Data

The current machine learning algorithms are affective in identifying patterns in big data bases, but they can not identify more abstract relations such as cause and effect. The SCALE (Causal inference in the human-biosphere coupled system) project aims at advancing in the field of causal inference based on data, developing new algorithms that understand the problems and generate causal explanations in an automatic way.

The team, formed by researchers from the Universitat de València and collaborators at Leipzig University and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Jena (Germany), will use this grant to apply the aforementioned algorithms to the system in which the Earth's biosphere and humans interact. “This is a system with multiple involved variables that interact with each other and result in so complex phenomenons such as migrations or climate change," states Gustau Camps, full university professor at the Universitat and researcher at IPL, at the Science Park of the academic institution.

Which is the impact of socio-economic changes on the biosphere? When and why can this system be unreliable? Are there any turning and critical points in the system? The SCALE project will investigate on these issues based on new mathematical techniques, with the ultimate objective of advancing in the understanding and sustainable development of the current society.

"Nowadays we count on mathematical methods to infer causal relations based on data and observations that promise to revolutionize science and impact on a large number of social, economic and environmental applications," explains Camps-Valls, who last year was engaged in an article in the Nature Communications journal signed by 21 scientists from 6 countries.

Gustau Camps is holder of an ERC Consolidator Grant ans a Sinergy Grant -also from the European Research Council- and has recently received 10 million Euros and dedicated the money to the improvement of climate models and the analysis and interpretation of the data from the Earth system. "The applications are countless; we can prove scientific hypothesis, verify the validity of the models, optimize treatments in clinical medicine, effects of adaptation of species in ecology; identify the variables that control changes in the socio-economic system, variables that cause the climate crisis and much more," he concludes.

These research project grants from the BBVA Foundation are a commitment to the promotion of scientific research and its projection into society, as a way of expanding the individual and collective opportunities and effectively tackling the main challenges of the 21st Century.

The fields targeted by this call are Biomedicine, Ecology and Conservation Biology, the Economy and Digital Society, Digital Humanities and Big Data.

In the area of Big Data, 5 grants are awarded with a maximum gross amount of 100,000 Euros for each one, dedicated to basic or applied research projects for the analysis of big and complex data, including techniques and algorithms of machine learning. 93 applications have been submitted for this edition. Of the five awarded projects, one went to the Universitat de València and the rest to the Universidade da Coruña, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, University of Seville and CSIC.