Building a city’s digital hub 

Scotland’s digital technologies industry contributes around £4bn in gross value added (GVA) to the Scottish economy, with export revenues on the up, and around 80,000 people estimated to be working in this expanding industry, while data capture and informatics are also features of technology and engineering, in turn contributing £12.7bn GVA, and employing around 161,000.

From health to banking, and retail to gaming, digital technology is revolutionising every aspect of people’s lives, and Edinburgh’s technology hub is at the heart of this flourishing Scottish sector.

Scotland’s capital is where you’ll find the UK’s most successful computing start-up community, with the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Informatics home to the largest concentration of internationally significant and world-leading informatics research in the UK, and the UK’s largest supercomputing centre (EPCC).

Here also is Scotland’s main focus for UK medical research data sharing, via the Farr network, and UK administrative research data sharing, via the Advanced Data Research network, and a world-leading genomics data facility at the Roslin Institute, along with a world-leading centre for Earth observation data at the Science and Technology Facilities Council/ University of Edinburgh’s Higgs Centre for Innovation.

Edinburgh is also the focus for major Scottish activities in translational data science, through the Scottish Funding Council Innovation Centres in data science and digital healthcare, and a major joint venture with the UK’s other principal data science universities at Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, and Warwick, to found the Alan Turing Institute.