IGERT

Integrating Information

Alternative titles:

Situational Awareness (unsuitable because of strong military associations)

Scenes, Situations, Environments: New Challenges for Information Integration

Towards the Integrated Information Science of the Future

The preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement will standardly require the integration of information deriving from archeologists, biologists, geologists, GIS technicians, and atmospheric scientists. Such cross-domain and cross-modality information integration is nowadays required as a matter of course in a variety of domains, from public health screening to aeronautical guidance, from oil exploration to meteorological sensor systems, from air traffic adverse event analysis to tracking of biological agents, and from enterprise information systems to intelligence analysis. Yet the methods for such information integration are still to a surprising degree ad hoc and fall short of forming a coherent curriculum which can be transmitted and tested and readily application to a variety of different sorts of problems by the scientists of the future.

We propose an IGERT 1. to train a future generation of information scientists in the theories and methods of information integration, 2. to train scientists in the use of such theories and methods in a variety of application domains.

The theories and methods we have in mind can be divided into six groups:

1. Ontologies (Barry Smith)

2. Databases (Aidong Zhang ?)

3. Referent Tracking (Werner Ceusters)

4. Image / Map Analysis (Thomas Bittner? Murali Ramanathan?)

6. Natural Language Understanding / Text Mining (Rohini Srihari ?)

We will foster projects to apply and extend these tools to address new challenges of cross-disciplinary communication in a variety of domains at a variety of scales, including:

• environmental hazards (?),

• realtime sensor data (biometric sensors, meteorological sensors ...)

• intelligence analysis

• biodefense

• epidemiology and public health

Faculty committed thus far:

Rajan Batta (CMIF)

Ling Bian (Geography / CMIF)

Werner Ceusters (Center for Bioinformatics)

John Crassidis (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering)

Maureen Donnelly (Philosophy)

Louis Goldberg (Oral Biology)

Bruce Holm (Center for Bioinformatics)

David Koepsell (Philosophy, Research Ethics)

Doug Perrelli (Anthropology)

Murali Ramanathan (Pharmaceutical Sciences)

Chris Renschler (Geography)

Tarunraj Singh (CMIF)

Barry Smith (Philosophy)

Rohini Srihari (Computer Science and Engineering)

Aidong Zhang (Computer Science and Engineering)

Ezra Zubrow (Anthropology)

Potentially interested:

Carol Berman (Anthropology)

Tom Bittner (Philosophy / Geography)

Marc Halfon (Biochemistry)

Eric Little (Associated with CMIF)

Howard Lasker (Geology)

David Mark (Geography)

Ann Yeh (Children's Hospital)