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

Now in its first full summer of operation, CCICADA campuses are buzzing with activities for both students and faculty.  Such programs as Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), the DHS Summer Research Teams Program for Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), the Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI), and the Reconnect Conference provide students and faculty with creative learning environments, designed to encourage collaboration amongst CCICADA institutions.  The individual programs enable students to work with faculty throughout the CCICADA network and allow for a little fun when working on complex problems in data analytics.  In other summer programs, CCICADA students are being funded as DHS Fellows to intern at national laboratories and government agencies to exercise their skills in solving homeland security problems. 

The CCICADA REU program is part of the longstanding REU program run by the Center for Discrete Math and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS), which is bringing more than 45 students together at Rutgers during summer 2010.  The program includes weekly seminars, such as the one given by the FEMA Region II Administrator, career and graduate school planning discussions, field trips to CCICADA’s partner industrial research laboratories, picnics, and a variety of student-organized outings.  Students participating in CCICADA’s REU program spend eight weeks at Rutgers University, the lead for CCICADA, working on research problems with one-on-one mentoring from a CCICADA faculty member.  The REU students represent universities from across the nation and are studying problems that include information clustering, disease dynamics, information flow in social networks, machine learning methods, inspection strategies at ports, analysis of effective leadership, and network traffic monitoring.  Their work will help monitor hazardous materials entering at ports, understand and control the spread of disease, detect anomalies in network traffic, and improve the ability to gain insight from complex data for better decision making and emergency response.

Rutgers is also the summer home for three faculty members and four students who are visiting CCICADA as part of the DHS Summer Research Teams Program for MSIs. This program seeks to engage faculty and students from MSIs in research projects that offer opportunities to understand the mission and research needs of DHS, while strengthening the talent pool of scientists and engineers nationwide.  The teams each spend ten weeks working in collaboration with a CCICADA faculty member on a jointly developed project, and in so doing, they lay the groundwork for potential future collaborations.  This summer, teams from Alabama A&M University, City College of New York, and New Jersey City University are working respectively on evacuating buildings, combining facial expression analysis with gesture analysis for more powerful recognition capabilities, and building a framework for integrating software tools developed at CCICADA. 

CCICADA partner institutions are also hosting programs with a truly national reach. The DSSI brought 22 advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students in computer science to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The participating students were selected from a national pool and participated in a 6-week residential summer program that weaved together an intensive class in the mathematical foundations of data science, tutorials on selected advanced data science topics, an Expert Speaker series represented by corporate, academic and industrial researchers and government thought leaders, as well as a set of collaborative, advanced research projects performed under the guidance of CCICADA faculty members.  These research projects were the capstones of the summer’s activity and included an iPhone/iPad-enabled heat map of campus crime data and statistics, an Expert Finder system which automatically generates “topic expert” lists, and a novel computer vision solution to compare near-identical images. The techniques developed as part of DSSI will make it easier and faster to find data dispersed through multiple independent sources.

Faculty members from across the country got their turn when they participated in the 2010 Reconnect Conference on Extracting and Visualizing Information from Natural Language Text held in June 2010.  Reconnect Conferences expose faculty teaching undergraduates, as well as interested professionals, to the role of the mathematical and computer sciences in homeland security by introducing them to current research topics that are relevant for classroom presentation. This year’s 19 Reconnect participants learned about methods for automatic identification and extraction of desired information from natural language text, toured the Port of Los Angeles to learn about homeland security problems in ports, and developed teaching modules that could be brought into their classrooms.  The conference was held on the USC campus and featured a weeklong series of lectures given by CCICADA Research Directors Eduard Hovy (USC) and Dan Roth (University of Illinois), as well as by John Stasko (Georgia Tech) and Zornitsa Kozareva (USC). The conference took participants from the early, simpler methods for information extraction through modern ones, and included theoretical and practical topics as well as hands-on exercises using software packages. 

CCICADA travel this summer is not just one-way.  Several Rutgers graduate students, supported under DHS-funded fellowships through CCICADA, have set out to exercise their skills in solving homeland security problems faced by government agencies and the national laboratories.  One of the conditions of these fellowships is that students do a summer internship at a venue concerned with homeland security.  CCICADA works with researchers at the national laboratories and other government agencies to identify a suitable mentor and project for each student’s summer internship.  So far, these internships have been a huge success. This summer, five of the six CCICADA Fellows are performing internships at such places as Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, as well as at the Department of Defense. The sixth CCICADA fellow has already performed two internships at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  Research topics for the internships cover such areas as improving biometric identification methods; guiding analysts through large data sets; developing methods for classifying audio files; finding patterns and detecting anomalies in social networks; and intercepting hazardous materials or other threats.  These internships broaden students’ perspectives and widen their network of colleagues – each fellow thus far has maintained partnership with their summer mentor following the internship and gone on to write research papers with them.  Each of the three mentors from previous internships have visited Rutgers and given seminar talks.  In this way, the fellows are establishing professional relationships and strengthening connections between Rutgers and the National Laboratories.   

The CCICADA REU, DSSI, and Reconnect programs are all annual summer programs that CCICADA will host each year.  These activities, combined with research workshops hosted by CCICADA and other DHS-sponsored programs like the Summer Research Teams and the fellowship program, will continue to make CCICADA campuses a hot summer destination.