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

减少发展中国家贫困水平的最有效方法是通过其持续的经济发展，从而提高人均收入水平。研究表明，实现这一目标的主要方法之一是通过企业和组织内部的生产率水平（定义为每小时工作的产出）的持续提高。对于泰国这样的中高收入经济体来说，生产率增长将越来越依赖于创新，而创新如今需要获得高科技技能。随着越来越多的泰国行业收集客户、生产线、分销网络、股票价格等方面的数据，最需要的高科技技能之一是处理大量数字数据的能力。我们正在进行的项目旨在为泰国北部地区的企业和组织提供这些技能，与曼谷等其他地区相比，该地区传统上遭受了较弱的经济增长。这个项目的第一步是使用大型天文数据集，让泰国数据科学家和他们的研究生接触“大数据”。在第一阶段取得成功之后，我们现在要求GCRF提供资金，以促进与五个预先选定的企业和组织合作，研究我们如何调整我们开发的技术和技能，以满足他们的数据处理和分析需求。在这样做的过程中，我们将利用我们团队的技能和技术，对这些外部合作伙伴产生真正的经济影响，同时我们建立与企业和组织合作的能力。这一经验将为我们建立一个完全自给自足的“卓越中心”的最终目标做好准备，以研究技术，满足泰国北部企业和组织的数据处理和分析需求。

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.