The Center for Dynamic Data Analysis (DyDAn) will host a Mini-Symposium on Discrete Science Applications in Homeland Security that features talks by the Directors of each of the four DHS Centers of Excellence affiliated with the
Institute for Discrete Sciences (IDS). IDS is a collaboration among DHS, the National Laboratories and the four affiliated Centers of Excellence, studying selected topics in data sciences, machine learning, and discrete mathematics that are collectively labeled "discrete sciences". The Centers of Excellence affiliated with IDS are based at Rutgers University, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign and the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
The four centers are focused on developing and extending computational technologies for deriving knowledge and understanding from the vast amounts of publicly available data. Homeland security relies on such data analytic capabilities to ferret out patterns and draw inferences from massive amounts of unstructured data contained in books, newspapers, reports, blogs, temporal and spatial data, images, and audio and video streams. The IDS centers offer cross-cutting information analysis support across the full spectrum of DHS applications ranging from terrorist threat detection, to protection against invasive species, to border security. The Mini-Symposium provides a sample of the work that is currently ongoing at each of the centers.