Today, everyone is talking about big-data analytics, video streaming, machine learning, web search, mobile apps, etc., and we all take it for granted that these "services" work perfectly. However, underneath such applications there are large systems, and individual components of these systems are often “only” a part of a big ecosystem of integrated building blocks needed to enable a functional service. In this respect, the HOST department addresses challenges potentially covering all components of the entire system, from data creation to visualisation of the results.

Using a combination of basic and applied research, we are targeting numerous applications, many in the field of sports and medicine, where we have a holistic view of the system and perform basic research, do experimental prototyping and run experiments in the intended environments. 

Currently, machine learning is an important component of our research where we for example, in real- time, aim to analyse athlete performance and detect diseases in medical videos. In our holistic systems view, not only the accuracy of the machine learning analysis is of importance, but also the complete pipe-line integration and the system performance (e.g., resource consumption and scalability). We architect complete systems and optimise for particular application requirements, both functional and non-functional, in order to provide a best possible quality of the service and a lowest possible resource consumption. Finally, we have a goal to put the results into use for the society where we contribute to open source projects and have spun of new industries