Two distinguished Indiana University Rudy Professors -- Stanley Wasserman, chair of the Department of Statistics, and Alessandro Vespignani, professor in the School of Informatics and Computing -- have been named as collaborators in a $35.5 million Army Research Laboratory project expected to span 10 years and involve 10 additional universities and corporations. Vespignani and Wasserman will receive $850,000 over five years and expect to receive equivalent funding for an additional five years as their work proceeds. Their work will focus on dynamic processes in networks and also on the study of organizational networks and how knowledge, particularly in the Army, is spread from peer to peer in the modern military. Full Story

Work by Indiana University's Katy Börner on visualizing knowledge and her Mapping Science exhibit have literally been around the globe -- on public display at the Chinese Academy of Science, on exhibit at Stanford University, and featured in the German Science Train's Expedition Zukunft (Expedition into the Future) in Europe that visited 62 cities during the previous seven months. IU's Börner presented her work on Dec. 10, along with portions of the exhibit, where it may have more influence than ever -- The Rayburn House Office Building of the U.S. Capitol complex. The room was populated by an invitation-only group of congressional staffers and federal agency officials interested in understanding how members of Congress can utilize advanced data analysis and visualization techniques to track and communicate the flow of innovation in their respective states or voting districts. Full Story

The interplay of human mobility patterns like those between local metropolitan commuters and long-range airline travelers during a global epidemic can be modeled in such detail so as to offer refined views of epidemics that could aid in public health emergency decision making, according to new research published by a team led by informaticists at Indiana University. The findings, published the week of Dec. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Online Early Edition, also note that with these refined computational strategies, new levels of accuracy about the behavior of targeted mobility networks and epidemic progression can be imagined. Full Story

A web tool developed by Indiana University is helping to monitor and assure the health of the two largest computational grids that support the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC, operated by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), made headlines in late November when it resumed operation after an electrical malfunction caused it to cease operation in September 2008. The new IU tool, called MyOSG, is a web portal that consolidates and presents information to create custom user views from multiple grid data sources. The tool was originally developed to allow technologists to monitor the function of the Open Science Grid (OSG), a national distributed computing grid for data-intensive research funded by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. As the Grid Operations Center (GOC) for the OSG, IU developed MyOSG to help monitor the many distributed high performance computing systems that make up the OSG. Full Story

Indiana University has been chosen by the National Science Foundation to help develop the Internet of the future. Under the grant, IU will explore the operation and deployment of the NSF-sponsored infrastructure for network research known as GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations). This award follows an earlier NSF grant to IU to construct an experimental supercomputing network called FutureGrid, which will enable new approaches to scientific research. The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is an experimental network research infrastructure sponsored by the National Science Foundation. This suite will support a wide range of network science and engineering experiments such as new protocols and data dissemination techniques running over a substantial fiber optic infrastructure with next-generation optical switches, novel high-speed routers, citywide experimental urban radio networks, high-end computational clusters and sensor grids. Full Story

The Dec. 7, 2009, issue of IT Matters @ IU provided in-depth accounts of the ceremonies dedicating IU's new $32.7 million Data Center and its new $10 million Innovation Center, both located at the Bloomington campus. The issue also included an announcement by President Michael McRobbie that IU would offer $10 million in venture capital funds to IU faculty researchers working to develop new innovations and technologies, a story about research showing how cloud computing can aid health research that will be supported with $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health, and a story recognizing Christopher S. Peebles, IU professor emeritus of anthropology and former dean of technology, for his contributions to the university. Full Story