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Command, Control and Interoperability Center of Excellence (CCI COE)

To have the greatest impact on the DHS mission, the CCI COE partner centers, VACCINE and CCICADA, work together to identify potential collaborative efforts within the entire education pipeline. They leverage existing expertise within the network of partner schools for program development and dissemination, thereby reducing duplication of effort. Collaborative programs that utilize their Center’s ability to obtain speakers and faculty for events, maximize promotional efforts, and share teacher and school contacts are described below.

Educational photos from CCICADA (www.ccicada.rutgers.edu).

National Conferences

VACCINE and CCICADA participate in joint program presentations at several national conferences with the goal of expanding visual and data analytics knowledge throughout the DHS and Minority Serving Institution (MSI) networks. Both had a strong presence at the National Association of Mathematicians NAM Mathfest this past November. In March 2010, at the DHS University Network Summit, in Washington DC, VACCINE and CCICADA will present Effective Strategies for Enhancing Command, Control and Interoperability COE MSI programs. Then at the ADMI -Association of Computer/ Information Sciences and Engineering Departments at Minority Institutions Annual Conference in April 2010, at Jackson State University, another presentation will focus on an overview of VACCINE/CCICADA education efforts and how MSI students can become involved in COE activities and programs.

Educational photos from VACCINE (www.visualanalytics-cci.org).

Training Faculty and Professionals

RECONNECT Conferences are week-long summer workshops that expose university undergraduate faculty to the mathematical/computer sciences research enterprise and its connections with homeland security. Faculty develop materials to take back to their students in their classes and to guide their undergraduates in research. Two RECONNECT Conferences will be held in Summer 2010. Faculty members from both CCICADA and VACCINE will conduct these workshops, one to be held at USC/ISI on Information Extraction and one to be held at Georgia Institute of Technology on Visual Analytics and Applications.

Visual Analytics and Applications at Georgia Institute of Technology, with Professors Georges Grinstein, University of Massachusetts Lowell, (grinstein@cs.uml.edu) and John Stasko, Georgia Institute of Technology, (stasko@cc.gatech.edu), Summer dates will be announced. Participants will be introduced to basic concepts and components of visual analytics (human, algorithmic, and visualization). They will work together to solve large and complex real-world problems in such areas as homeland security and bioinformatics. Each participant will use a variety of algorithms and visualizations with realistic data sets.

Information Extraction (IE) in Los Angeles CA the second week of June, with Professors Eduard Hovy, USC/ISI, http://www.isi.edu/~hovy/, Zornitsa Kozareva, USC/ISI, http://www.isi.edu/~kozareva/, and Dan Roth, UIUC, http://l2r.cs.uiuc.edu/ . Automatic extraction of desired information from natural language text is increasingly used for medical informatics, business applications, and the intelligence community. In this application, the input is one or more texts in the domain in question, and the output is a database containing just the desired fields of information, extracted from the source material and formatted appropriately. This week-long course will take students from the early, simpler, methods through the modern ones, and will include theoretical and practical lectures as well as hands-on exercises using software packages. The lecturers are renowned experts in the various aspects of IE and its visualization, and have a long history of teaching informative, engaging, and fun lectures.

Undergraduate Summer Programs

In 2010, VACCINE and CCICADA will share publicity and recruitment opportunities for three hands-on summer research opportunities for undergraduate students.

Rutgers hosts the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/REU/ from June 1 – July 23, 2010. CCICADA will select five undergraduates to participate in the program which begins with eight weeks of intensive work during the summer of 2010. Students are strongly encouraged to continue their projects during the academic year 2010-2011.

Purdue University hosts the Visual Analytics Summer Program (VASP), a partner with Purdue’s longtime Summer Undergrad Research Fellowships Program (SURF) https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/Research/SURF, May 24th – August 6th, 2010. The SURF program provides students across all engineering, science and technology disciplines with an intensive research experience, allowing them to work closely with graduate students and professors. This setting provides undergraduate students with an avenue to perform research in visual analytics while exploring future graduate study options.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers the Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) http://mias.illinois.edu/dssi/summer_institute, May 24-July 2, 2010. The summer institute weaves together mathematical foundations, applications, and research in a 6 week workshop. Its mission is to encourage computer science college students, particularly from minority serving institutions and EPSCoR states with small research programs, 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. Limited scholarships are available.

K-12 Curricula, Courses, and Materials

Purdue University will host a series of K-12 teacher workshops during the summer of 2010. These workshops will introduce teachers to visualization and data analytics topics and education modules. Program materials are developed jointly with the goal of rotating these workshops in the future to other interested schools and universities throughout the COE partner network. VACCINE has developed middle school and high school ‘teaser’ or ‘minimodules’ related to homeland security and visual analytics topics. Each minimodule in the series covers 3-5 class periods. All have already been launched in Indiana with exceptional ratings. These modules will be shared with and expanded into larger curricula and courses by CCICADA. See these modules at http://www.purdue.edu/discoverypark/vaccine/educat ion/k-12.php. Please, visit the websites to read about these and additional upcoming educational opportunities.