ACADEMIA

RiverGlass, Inc., a start-up company that is commercializing data-mining technology developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), has earned a grant of $150,000 from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s Homeland Security Market Development bureau. Two RiverGlass products, RiverGlass Detect and RiverGlass Recon, will enable law enforcement agencies to access and share vital information, improving their capacity to evaluate and respond to threats. RiverGlass Recon is being implemented by the Illinois State Police at the Terrorism and Intelligence Center in Springfield. RiverGlass plans to use the grant funding to hire several new software developers at its location at the research park at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. RiverGlass was founded by Michael Welge, the leader of NCSA's Data Division, and is based on data-mining and data analysis tools developed in the center's Automated Learning Group. These tools enable users to extract meaning from massive amounts of data of diverse types by searching for patterns, making predictions, identifying unusual features, optimizing complex problems, and visualizing the results For more on RiverGlass, go to its Web site.