In combination with the School of Computing Dr Tao Chen in the ERI has completed a project for a Scottish company Lettingweb.com on analysing private rents across Scotland. It should come as no surprise that rents in the Craiglockhart postcode area are well above the Scottish average, for example the average rent for a two bedroom flat in the postcode EH14 was £703 for September to November compared with £625 for all of Scotland and the average time to let for properties in EH14 was 25 days compared to 33 days for Scotland as a whole. Tao statistically analysed rents across Scotland and researchers in the school of computing are using his analysis to produce interactive web pages to aid those searching for rented accommodation.

 

Other commercial work in the ERI includes undertaking “Big Data Analysis” training for a major call centre company and Dr Mike Pearson has just begun a project forecasting the sales of speciality shoes throughout a distribution chain in the UK.

 

In the ERI’s KTP project with Games Analytics the KTP associate Anusa Singh-Roy and Robert Raeside has just last week achieved a major breakthrough in beginning the analysis of interactions between people playing massive free to play online games. They implemented social network analysis in the package R to visualise the interaction and identify influential players.