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Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA)

Group of students who participated in the DSSI.

The 2010 Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) at the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign brought together 22 top college computer science juniors, seniors and graduate students from all over the U.S. in a 6-week long study in Data Science areas. The educational initiatives for DSSI were developed to encourage computer science students to pursue graduate studies at stronger institutions where they can make a bigger impact on the field, and to expose them to national lab professionals. The mission of the DSSI is to develop diverse human resources to enhance the scientific research, education, and government workforce in Data Science disciplines.

This program is funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence—Command, Control, and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA) at the UIUC’s Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) Center.

The first week of the program included a Kick-off of presentations with UIUC and Computer Science Department administrators, an informative panel of current UIUC graduate students discussing life at UIUC and the upcoming advanced research projects, and a “Meet & Greet” social activity.

During the 6 week workshop, the students attended half-day classes, taught by Dr. Cinda Heeren, for a total of 36 hours in the advanced course “Foundations of Data Sciences:  The Mathematics, Algorithms and Tools for Data Analytics.”  Along with the Data Science course, every afternoon for the first 4 weeks students were able to take advantage of other rich instruction offered by some of the world’s foremost researchers in Data Science, including:

• Professor Dan Roth,Machine Learning Approaches for Natural Language Understanding and Information Extraction;
• Professor Jiawei Han, Knowledge Discovery in Social and Information Networks;
• Professor ChengXiang Zhai, Information Retrieval and Web Information Access; and
• Professor David Forsyth, Computer Vision.

Three weeks into the program, the DSSI students held formal presentations highlighting their large systems research projects. These public presentations were well-attended and included a presentation from the DHS Program Manager, Joe Kielman.

Education Director of the DSSI program, Nancy Komlanc, said, “This year’s DSSI has been the most successful so far when taking into consideration the over-all caliber of the students, the program organization, online application process, and advanced projects. Even the awards on the Final Presentation day were a big hit. I was extremely impressed with the Final Presentations and the advanced computer systems that the students were able to create in such a short period of time. One of the projects they worked on, “Crime Map”, is now an official iPhone and iPod app entitled ‘Illini Crime.’” Illini Crime may be viewed at: http://www.illinicrime.com/.

The culminating event on the last day of the DSSI was the “Final Research Project Presentations.”  With over 80 people in attendance, including representatives from UIUC administration, local media, campus personnel, and DHS officials, the presentations were well attended and deemed extremely impressive. Projects presented were: 1) Expert Finder, 2) Computer Vision and 3) Crime Map. Media coverage of the event included: WCIA-TV (CBS), UIUC Daily Illini Newspaper, and the UIUC College of Engineering.

Information for the 2011 Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) may be found at: http://mias.illinois.edu/DSSI2011