DyDAn Official Launch

DyDAn kicks off officially on Fed 26th with a series of talks. There will be talks by Director of Research Futures in DHS, Deputy Director of Inst for Sc. Computing Research at LLNL, and Stephen Fienberg from CMU. Privacy in data analysis is obviously an important theme. In database research community, there is growing emphasis on this. See the 8 papers in 2 revelant sessions at ICDE 2007 and more are forthcoming in SIGMOD and PODS 2007.

RVACs

One of the key aspects of data analysis is visualization. DHS in collaboration with the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC) has established Regional Visualization and Analytics Centers (RVACs) to provide both research expertise and training and education programs. The research program of the RVACs sounds very exciting, in particular, since they include careful study of collaborative decision making methods.

Other UACs

Besides DyDAn, IDS has announced University Affiliate Centers at:

• University of Illinois
• University of Pittsburgh
• University of Southern California

These UACs explore research topics from multi-modal information synthesis to knowledge integration and methods for summarization of opinions in text. Together with DyDAn, the UACs represent a wide range of researchers, from algorithms and discrete math to knowledge discovery and mining, to statistics and multi-modal informatics. This represents an exciting opportunity for learning new problems, developing new techniques and applying ideas across multiple areas.

One of the focuses of UACs is to train researchers at all levels. So look forward to workshops, REU programs, summer schools and others.

Introducing DyDAn

The Department of Homeland Security DHS) has different ways to support research. In particular, DHS now supports research via the Institute of Discrete Sciences (IDS), a joint project between DHS and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. The Institute has announced four University Affiliate Centers (UACs) for research. DyDAn is the UAC based at Rutgers University in NJ. The focus at DyDAn is on research in Algorithms, Discrete Math and Data Analysis, and applications thereof.

This blog will be a forum for researchers not only at DyDAn, but also other UACs and researchers everywhere to interact with each other. Therefore, this blog will not only feature announcements, but also discuss research problems and progress at DYDAn, other UACs and the general research community on topics of common interest to IDS. We welcome comments, suggestions and discussions, directly through blog comments or via email.