Four Universities to Collaborate on New Homeland Security Research
August 3, 2006
Four universities were selected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to conduct research on advanced methods for information analysis and to develop computational technologies that contribute to securing the homeland.
These university affiliate centers and their partners will collaborate with the Institute for Discrete Sciences (IDS), a joint project between DHS and several national laboratories, led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Their work will help identify common patterns from sources of information which may indicate potential threats to the nation. The centers will also focus on an area identified by Congress for DHS university-based research.
The discrete sciences apply the methods of discrete, or finite, mathematics to computer science. Their focus is developing simpler, more efficient software algorithms and architectures for use in a broad range of computing applications. The university affiliate centers will be studying topics such as:
- Knowledge representation.
- Natural language processing.
- Text or information extraction.
- Uncertainty quantification.
- High-performance computing architectures.
These will be applied by the Science and Technology Directorate to address problems in information analysis, decision support, risk analysis, critical infrastructure protection, bioinformatics and computational biology. 
Rutgers University will serve as the coordinating affiliate center, joined by the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pittsburgh. DHS will award a combined total of $10.2M over three years to these institutions and their partners.
"The biggest challenge facing this critical area is the need for improved methods to quickly and accurately analyze, organize and make sense of vast amounts of changing data," said Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, acting undersecretary for Science and Technology (S&T).
The university affiliate centers to IDS are part of the DHS Research and Education Centers program, overseen by the Office of University Programs, within S&T. Established by Congress, the program created an integrated network of centers at the nation’s leading research universities, which will help to align scientific results with homeland security priorities.
Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).