Georgia Tech gets federal grant to help sort and organize information

In today's digital age, some scientists and government agencies are experiencing something many of us can relate to: information overload.

For help, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation are turning to academic researchers nationwide, led by a group of scientists at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Georgia Tech announced Wednesday it has received a $3 million grant from DHS and the NSF to oversee development of new analytical tools and other technologies to help sort through, organize and visually display growing mountains of information gathered regularly on everything from hurricanes and terrorists to potential cures for deadly diseases.

"We're all getting more access to a lot more data in various forms ... and it's getting challenging to make sense of all that," said John Stasko, a principal investigator for the project and a professor in Georgia Tech's College of Computing. Some of the new research will be based on an analytics program called Jigsaw created by a team led by Stasko.

"This is all about giving (scientists and government agencies) data in a better form that they can work with more easily," he said.

Along with the five-year grant to Georgia Tech, the government agencies awarded seven smaller grants to other schools that will work under Georgia Tech's coordination. Among them are Duke University in North Carolina and schools in New York, Michigan, Illinois and California.

Organizing the growing amounts of data created by the digitization of information is an increasingly common struggle.

Companies such as Miamisburg, Ohio-based Teradata Corp. built businesses based on storing and sorting corporate data. Just Wednesday, Google Inc. announced a new application that lets companies index, organize and search up to 10 million documents at a time to try and get a handle on corporate information overload.

What researchers at Georgia Tech and elsewhere want to do is develop new algorithms and other technology that can be used to build new kinds of super Google-like search engines for DHS and scientists. The programs they develop can be used to find, sort and organize all sorts of data - both on the Web and in internal databases - and then show decision makers just what's important at the relevant time, all in an interactive and visually appealing way.

For DHS, for instance, researchers might come up with new ways to sort information about historical hurricane patterns, mix and match that with real-time data from offshore and onshore sensors, combine all that with live on-the-ground Internet reports from observers and the media to create better, more accurate hurricane tracking systems. The same sort of analytics could be done for information about potential terrorists that is stored in disparate corners of the Internet and on vast databases worldwide.

For scientists, the researchers might come up with better ways to cross-reference work done in labs worldwide to find patterns and similarities that might result in new discoveries.

"It's not really just about amounts (of data), it's about the diversity of it too," said NSF program director Larry Rosenblum. "There's so many different types of data coming from so many places ... this is something that really needs to be done."

The program is part of a new NSF initiative called Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics, or FODAVA.

Bob Keefe covers technology for Cox News Service.