Data Governance and Engineering
Data Governance and Engineering unit at JADS
What is the Data Governance and Engineering Unit?
The Data Governance and Engineering (DGE) unit aims to lead the data and AI engineering discourse by setting high standards of excellence in research, impact, and education. This unit addresses significant real-world challenges by integrating multiple perspectives—conceptual, methodological, and substantive—and employing diverse research techniques to develop innovative solutions. DGE focuses on data-intensive and AI-enabled services and products, such as financial services utilizing machine learning for risk analysis, insurance services incorporating AI to address climate change, automatic surveillance systems using deep learning for anomaly detection, and medical services offering personalized advisory to improve the living conditions of elderly individuals. The unit seeks to bring together experts in empirical research on data entrepreneurship, formal modeling from the data analytics domain, and action design research to create well-governed, data-intensive software services through both experiment-driven and design-oriented research.
Why is Data Governance and Engineering important?
Data Governance and Engineering is essential for addressing the growing challenges of data-intensive services and AI-enabled products in an increasingly data-driven world. By fostering an environment that blends empirical research, formal modeling, and application-oriented design, the DGE unit ensures that complex societal issues can be tackled using cutting-edge data and AI solutions. This approach facilitates the development of impactful, innovative technologies—ranging from healthcare improvements to climate-related risk assessments—that ultimately enhance both business and societal outcomes.
Our research
The research of the Data Governance and Engineering (DGE) unit is characterized by its broad collaborations beyond JADS, engaging with universities, research institutes, industry, and governments to foster impactful partnerships. These alliances extend to the founding universities, European Horizon projects, national projects, and partnerships with leading institutions such as IBM TJ Watson Research Center, SAP Research, NXP, ASML, Deloitte, and NVIDIA. Our collaborations ensure the alignment and integration of European competence and knowledge, enhancing the uptake of scientific results and extending the durability of our research impact.
Our research focuses on addressing grand societal challenges like health, secure societies, and smart and sustainable industries through a quadruple helix model, involving companies, government bodies, research organizations, and citizens in near real-world settings. Researchers at the DGE unit actively initiate, lead, and contribute to international research projects. Our teaching contributions also play an important role, encompassing courses in JADS’s (pre)MSc, PDEng, and PE programs totaling around 84 ECTS annually.
Projects and Labs
Lab: SAFEGUARD
The new SAFEGUARD lab, part of the ROBUST AI program, will explore, develop and validate novel auditing theories, tools, and methodologies to monitor and audit whether AI applications adhere in terms of fairness, explainability, transparency, robustness and reliability, respect of privacy, and safety and security.
Project: Comfortage
The rapidly aging European population poses significant challenges to society and the economy. The ComfortAge project aims to address these issues by developing holistic and integrated healthcare models tailored to the needs of individuals with age-related mental and physical diseases.
Project: Oncoscreen
Modern healthcare systems need to offer new non-invasive methods for colorectal cancer screening and to improve its early detection. ONCOSCREEN project responds to this challenge and plans to develop a ground-breaking set of technologies and methods for colorectal cancer screening.
Research team
Willem Jan van den Heuvel
Unit lead and full professor
Marco Tonnarelli
PhD Candidate
Ambarish Moharil
PhD Candidate
Stefan Driessen
PhD Candidate
Damian Tamburri
Associate Professor
Indika Priyantha Kumara Weerasingha Dewage
Assistant professor.
Derkjan Elzinga
PhD Candidate
Joshua Owotogbe
PhD Candidate
Nemania Borovits
PhD Candidate
Roya Nasiri
PhD Candidate
Stefano Fossati
PhD Candidate
Qusai Khaled
PhD Candidate