SYSTEMS

Indiana University has achieved the designation of a Sun Microsystems, Inc. Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management and Discovery. This Center of Excellence will focus on the research of Dr. Katy Börner, assistant professor at the IU Bloomington School of Library and Information Science, and Dr. Zina Ben-Miled, assistant professor in the School of Engineering and Technology at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. Börner focuses on techniques for discovering and manipulating relationships among unstructured textual information, such as published research papers; Ben-Miled examines techniques for management of high performance databases used in large-scale laboratory studies. Börner's work will provide an infrastructure that scientists will use to access datasets and to exchange and test new knowledge management, discovery, and visualization technologies. Börner will develop a database of about 15 million records from bibliographical databases in many fields as a proving and testing ground for information visualization tools. No similar facility for comparing tools currently exists. Ben-Miled's work will examine the problem of laboratory data management, and particularly the seamless integration of many large and disparate online databases. Ben-Miled focuses in particular on building tools that permit the integration of discipline-specific Web databases in ways that permit high performance cross-disciplinary investigations. The high-powered Sun infrastructure required to support the activities of Börner and Ben-Miled is referred to as the Research Database Complex (RDC). The RDC comprises two Sun Fire V1280 server dedicated to research database use, each with 12 CPUs, 96GB memory, and 6TB shared disk; and a Sun Fire V880 server with four CPUs and 8GB memory which acts as a Web server for the databases. The RDC is managed by Stephanie Burks, a principal Unix systems administrator for the Research and Academic Computing Division of University Information Technology Services. "In a world where the Internet allows access to data and information anywhere, from any device, at any time, knowledge management is continuing to gain increasing importance," said Kim Jones, vice president, Global Education and Research, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The relationship between Sun and Indiana University will enable our researchers to work together in order to develop new technologies that will provide a broad range of academic and commercial benefits to both markets." Brad Wheeler, associate vice president for Research and Academic Computing and dean for Information Technology remarks, "The establishment of this Center of Excellence highlights the value of IU's growing stature in information sciences, as well as the quality of the research at the IUPUI campus. Additionally, it's fitting that this announcement comes at the end of Women's History Month. The fact that all of the principal Indiana University participants are women underscores the outstanding women in high-tech research and development at IU." Indiana University's support of women in high tech fields includes a Women in Computing group (http://www.cs.indiana.edu/wic/) and sponsorship of the upcoming Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference (http://www.gracehopper.org/). For more information about Börner's and Ben-Miled's research, see: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~katy/ http://www.engr.iupui.edu/~miled/