For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretay
Contact: 202-282-8010
July 25, 2006

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today the selection of a team of four universities 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.

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 such topics as knowledge representation, natural language processing, text or information extraction, uncertainty quantification, and 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 $10.2 million over three years to these institutions and their partners.  Their work will advance efforts to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information, which may be indicative of potential threats to the nation.  The centers will also focus on an area identified by Congress for DHS university-based research.

“This effort will bring together an outstanding group of researchers with a proven track record in information analysis,” said Dr. Jeffrey W. Runge, Acting Under Secretary for Science and Technology (S&T).  “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.”

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, this program has created an integrated network of centers at the Nation’s leading research universities, which will help to continually align scientific results with homeland security priorities.

For more information about IDS, visit https://www.llnl.gov/car/IDS.  For more information about University Programs, visit http://www.dhs.gov/universityprograms.

###