From Stars to Baht: Broadening the economic impact of astronomical data handling techniques in Thailand

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The most effective way of reducing levels of poverty in developing countries is through their continued economic development, which leads to increased levels of income per person. Research has shown that one of the main ways of achieving this is through maintained increases in levels of productivity (defined as output per hour worked) within businesses and organisations. For an upper-middle income economy such as Thailand's, productivity growth will increasingly rely on innovation, which today requires access to high-tech skills. With more and more Thai industries collecting data on their customers, production lines, distribution networks, stock prices, etc., one of the most crucially needed high-tech skills is the ability to handle large amounts of digital data. Our ongoing project aims to provide such skills for businesses and organisations in the Northern region of Thailand which has traditionally suffered from weaker economical growth compared to other regions such as Bangkok. The first step in this project -- for which we received Newton funding -- was to use large astronomical datasets to expose Thai data scientists and their postgraduate students to "Big Data". Following the success of that first stage, we now request GCRF funding to facilitate working with five pre-selected businesses and organisations to research how we can adapt the technologies and skills we have developed to meet their data handling and analysis needs. In doing so, we will be using our team's skills and technologies to have a real economic impact on these external partners, while we build our capacity for working with businesses and organisations. This experience will be excellent preparation for our ultimate goal of establishing a fully self-sustaining "Centre of Excellence" for researching technologies to meet the data handling and analysis needs of businesses and organisations in Northern Thailand.