Security grant on text analysis

Friday, August 11, 2006

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will give the University of Pittsburgh $2.4 million over three years to develop techniques for "extracting, summarizing and tracking" information on events and opinions from available text.

Pitt is one of four University Affiliate Centers selected by DHS to both research advanced methods for information analysis and "develop computational technologies" that could help protect the country. Other recipients are Rutgers University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Southern California.

The project will advance efforts to identify patterns from information sources that could suggest a potential threat. But the work will have applications in other fields, said Janyce Wiebe, Pitt computer science professor and lead researcher.

Privacy "is very important to this program" and only public information sources like news databases and online bulletin boards will be used.

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