Briefs

The NSF is working with the CIA's technology branch to develop data-mining techniques in order to analyze communications and hopefully prevent terrorist activity. The work will involve detection of specific keywords and topics across a variety of media.

Gary Strong, program officer for NSF's Directorate for Computer & Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE), said that the research will focus on two areas: data streams and data sharing.

"With audio and video streaming there is little hope of saving information because the databases are constantly in flux and you have to make real-time decisions on what to save," said Strong. Consequently, researchers will work on "mining" underlying patterns and trends while pinpointing changes in those patterns.

An NSF-sponsored workshop held in December identified some 40 potential data-mining projects of interest to the intelligence community. Of those, 15 were chosen to receive funding over the next three years as part of the cooperative venture.

In one chosen project, SRI International will investigate ways to enable machines to recognize individuals by the way they talk. In another project, researchers at Columbia University are working on a system to track patterns in data types -- such as broadcast news programs, online chat rooms, e-mail and voice mail -- and then automatically generate a summary of information about a specific event.

See http://sci.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18872.html