Curious about what synthetic data could mean for your research or teaching?

DASH is looking for new use cases within the UMCG for a pilot project on synthetic data.

Synthetic data are artificially generated datasets designed to reproduce relevant characteristics and statistical patterns of real data. They can provide a useful alternative when realistic data are needed for purposes such as education, research, software development or testing, but access to the original data is restricted because of privacy or confidentiality concerns.

Over the past year, DASH has been developing and testing a practical process for specifying, generating, evaluating, approving and using synthetic data within UMCG. We have already applied this process in educational pilots and are now looking for new cases to help us test and further improve it.

We are particularly interested in cases where:

• a data user, such as a researcher, teacher or course coordinator, needs realistic tabular data for a specific purpose; and
• a data controller within UMCG has suitable original data, but these data cannot or should preferably not be shared for that purpose because of privacy or confidentiality considerations.

As capacity is limited, proposed cases will be assessed based on their feasibility, data readiness, relevance to the pilot and fit with the project timeline.

Do you have a potential use case in your department? Send a short description of the data and how you would like to use them to [email protected]. We would be happy to explore whether it could become one of our next pilots.