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News Release

Last modified: Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Grants from IU Data to Insight Center support academically diverse data management projects

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Sept. 8, 2010

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The Data to Insight Center (D2I) at Indiana University's Pervasive Technology Institute has announced the recipients of five internal grants that will be used to fund academically diverse projects related to data management. The one-year grants range in amounts from $30,000 to $50,000, and total more than $235,000.

The D2I grants are designed to advance projects in areas such as extensible infrastructure for data interoperability, data to insight, data lifecycles, digital data curation and scientific data preservation. These areas have become increasingly important in scientific research, as they help scientists interpret and evaluate the quality and authenticity of very large data sets.

D2I director Beth Plale, a professor in the IU Bloomington School of Informatics and Computing, said a wide range of disciplines were represented among the awardees.

"Though all grounded in informatics principals, these grant projects touch upon a variety of scientific domains, including the geological sciences, ecology, biology, social science and archaeology," she said. "The diversity in these funded projects reflects the importance of high-quality data management across nearly every type of contemporary scientific inquiry."

Successful grant awards went to:

• Informatics assistant professor David Crandall in the SoIC, in collaboration with ecologists from San Francisco State University. Using a photo sharing site such as Flickr to track biological phenomena, the group will apply data mining and computer vision techniques to link together millions of photographs, each mapped to a specific place and time.
• Informatics professor Geoffrey Brown has engaged IU Bloomington faculty from six science departments to apply ideas and prototype tools for low-risk, high-quality migration of scientific data from legacy data formats that may lead to discovery of important tools for IU's data preservation strategy.

• Geological Sciences assistant scientist Christine Shriner and professor Arndt Schimmelmann will create an open, web-based virtual organization to integrate activities across archaeology, geology, and geochemistry, related to Aegean archaeology.
• Computer science professor David Leak will explore case-based tools for data access and refinement. Case-based problem-solving solves problems by retrieving and applying solutions to previous problems and at IU case-based reasoning investigations are directed toward design support, planning and explanation.

• Associate professor of computer science and informatics Fil Menczer and informatics associate professor and Complex Systems Program director Alessandro Flammini will explore an interoperable framework for real-time management and analysis of massive social media data streams.

About the Data to Insight Center

The Data to Insight Center (D2I) undertakes research to harness the vast stores of digital data being produced by modern computational resources, allowing scientists and companies to make better use of these data and find the important meaning that lies within them. D2I creates tools and visualizations for working with very large data sets, develops methods to ensure data provenance (quality and authenticity), and builds methods for listing and discovering data sets. D2I is part of Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) at Indiana University. Funded by a $15-million grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., PTI is dedicated to the development and delivery of innovative information technology and policy to advance research, education, industry, and society.

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