Washington, D.C. -  A $2.4 million grant that will assist the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science with the processing of vast amounts of data in multiple formats was announced today by U.S. Rep. Timothy V. Johnson.

     The grant is part of a $10.2 million appropriation to four universities from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Institute for Discrete Sciences.

     “These universities, and particularly the U. of I., were chosen because of the unique talents available here to research and make sense of the vast and constantly evolving array of information technologies,” Rep. Johnson said. “This is real science that will lead to better intelligence and better communication.”

     The U. of I. proposal, Multimodal Information Access and Synthesis, will advance the understanding and technologies required to deal with large amounts of information available today in multiple textual forms, images, data bases and other formats. The center builds on Department of Computer Science strengths in such areas as machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing, databases and data mining. 

     "The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a national leader in using technology to make information accessible and understandable,” said Chancellor Richard Herman. “This grant will allow us to develop the fundamental theories, computational models and tools to help interpret data. We are grateful to Congressman Johnson for his role in providing our researchers this opportunity."

     Also funded under the three-year awards are Rutgers University, $3 million; University of Southern California, $2.4 million; and University of Pittsburgh, $2.4 million.

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