Briefs

networkworld, Michael Cooney, 01/07/09

The National Science Foundation is furthering its search for highly interpretive technology to help all manner of government and private researchers evaluate the massive amounts of data generated in health care, computational biology, security and other fields.

In a nutshell, the NSF said it is seeking mathematical and computational algorithms and techniques that will fundamentally improve law enforcement and the intelligence communities' ability to transform large, often streaming data sets, e-mails, images, numbers and sounds into a form that better supports visualization and analytic reasoning, NSF stated. To enable visual-based data exploration, it is necessary to discover new algorithms that will represent and transform all types of digital data into mathematical formulations and computational models that will subsequently enable efficient, effective visualization and analytic reasoning techniques, the NSF stated.

The potentially controversial dark side if this research is that the NSF is working hand-in-hand with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop some of this technology. Obviously interpreting data from potential terrorist organizations and the like would be within its purview but when you see mention of healthcare and biological data interpretation interest in the same sentence as DHS, hackles go up.

This latest round of research is part of a five-year, $3 million project known as the Foundation on Data Analysis and Visual Analytics (FODAVA) research initiative lead by the Georgia Institute of Technology. DHS and NSF anointed in August Georgia Tech-led to establish FODAVA as a distinct research field and build a community of top-quality researchers that will collaborate on research workshops and conferences, industry engagement and technology transfer.

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