ACADEMIA

The director of the nation's largest supercomputing initiative will share his expertise with business and information technology leaders attending the March 8-9 meeting of the Data and Search Institute at the Indiana University School of Informatics. Charlie Catlett, who heads the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, is the featured guest of the DSI's kickoff meeting, which partners IU researchers with industry to boost innovation and competition in the United States. Catlett -- a senior fellow at the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago -- was part of the original team that established the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. IU is among nine U.S. universities and research centers participating in TeraGrid, whose collective efforts are geared to enable new, 21st century science innovations through high-performance computing. The multi-university Data and Search Institute is sponsored by the National Science Foundation through the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program, the Indiana University School of Informatics and industry contributions. "DSI is a tremendously exciting initiative in partnering with industry to stimulate innovation transfer. A stellar cross-disciplinary team means projects can be undertaken that have far-reaching impact on tomorrow's technologies," said DSI Director Beth Plale, associate professor of computer science at the School of Informatics. "The future will be dominated by those who can most effectively search for data, use it and then create value from it. Education is a key component of this. A key goal of the institute is to educate next generation technologists and informaticians in the multidisciplinary aspects of this vitally important emerging field." DSI promises to be a boon to its many partners, and members engage with the institute in different ways. Industry executives and their technical staffs are expected to use the Bloomington-based facilities, bolstering the region's status as a burgeoning high-technology location. Students will have the chance to use the latest equipment and search tools, exposing them to problems and challenges faced in private industry. Some Indiana businesses have recognized that value already. Among those firms attending the DSI meeting are the Indiana-headquartered companies Rhysome, Eli Lilly and Company, Bioconvergence, as well as national corporations including IBM, Attenex, EMC2 and Muse Global. The institute, located in the IU's Informatics Research Institute, has more than a dozen nationally recognized researchers in all aspects of data and search. Their expertise spans from communication protocols and service architectures, to databases, artificial intelligence, theory, human-computer interaction, complex networks, bioinformatics and social informatics. The Bloomington-based DSI was formed in September 2006 in partnership with Florida International University on the project. Joining Plale in leading the institute is Dennis Gannon, professor of computer science; and Napthali Rishe, director of the High Performance Database Research Center at FIU. Among IU researchers involved in DSI are: Randall Bramley, Dennis Gannon, Sun Kim, Dirk Van Gucht, Dennis Groth, David Leake, Andrew Lumsdaine, Filippo Menczer, Beth Plale, Ed Robertson, Luis Rocha, Kalpana Shakar and Eric Stolterman and Yuqiing (Melanie) Wu. The DSI also has strong ties to IU's Pervasive Technologies Labs and the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Chemical Informatics and Cyberinfrastructure Collaboratory at IU. Businesses interested in participating or wanting more information about the DSI Kickoff meeting should contact Beth Plale at (812) 855-4373, or at plale@cs.indiana.edu. More information about the Data and Search Institute is at its Web site.