The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Drexel University plan to establish a national research center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI). This center is funded by the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program of the National Science Foundation, the members from industry and government (the CVDI members) and university matching funds.
Goals
CVDI would be the center of excellence in Visual Analytics research, driven by academic experts in various disciplines, world-class visualization and supercomputing facilities and the needs of the industry. While the center would focus on the basic research necessary to develop and advance future technologies, funding opportunities for applied research to translate research ideas to products that reflects the needs of its government and industry members will be sought.
The centers goals would be to
- Accelerate the creation and transfer of knowledge and technology to industry and commercial products.
- Discover, share and leverage synergies of concepts, technologies and resources needed by industry-relevant Visual and Decision Informatics research.
- Create future workforce that benefit the local and national economy by educating a diverse body of students on the interdisciplinary field of Visual and Decision Informatics.
In summary, the CVDI value proposition is to offer a low cost, low risk venue for the industry and government agencies to validate the early stage innovation with involvement of university faculty, post doctorate scholars and students.
Technical Scope
In order to make an informed decision and gain insights from complex heterogeneous data, users are typically involved in a series of analysis and exploratory process. This is true for a computer scientist trying to analyze a network of World Wide Web, a biologist or chemist studying a molecular compound for drug discovery or a homeland security professional analyzing the interdependency between the nation's critical infrastructures in dimension of space and time. The focus of CVDI will be the creation of a set of new Decision-Making Environments (DME) that allows user to explore and customize information streams in a variety of modalities to gain better insight to information.
Decision-Making Environments is a novel concept embodied in a layered framework for the development of analytic and visual tools that enable users to make better decisions through information exploration and analysis. The user can choose between or fuse information streams in a variety of modalities, depending on the one that offers the best insight. Analysis programs running simultaneously in the background supplemented with visual displays, analytic summaries and statistical insights. This environment is thus a seamless integration of many components, including analytic, visualization, perception as well as human/computer interface.
Benefits of Membership
As a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the CVDI, you will have access to the leading-edge developments in Visual and Decision Informatics and have an opportunity to provide direction to the centers research projects that directly reflect the need of your organization and potential end-users of the technology. You will also have access to the interdisciplinary knowledge base from academic researchers and engage with other industry advisory board members to explore potential opportunities.
Benefits of membership include:
- One-stop access to interdisciplinary university professors, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students from partner universities
- A well-equipped venue to investigate a research topic that may otherwise be expensive to investigate with your existing staff
- Formal periodic project reviews along with continuous informal interaction and timely access to reports, papers and intellectual property generated by the center, which significantly reduces your risk to validate your innovative ideas
- Convenient access to world-class facilities, including cloud computing, supercomputing and immersive visualizations
- Recruitment opportunities to attract outstanding graduate students
- Opportunity to network and collaborate with other industry advisory board members to explore joint venues of collaboration
- Leverage R&D investments and access external technologies; The NSF matches one dollar for every three dollars jointly spent by industry members.
Further information pertaining to advantages of industry memberships in a I/UCRC and factors that help in making the decision of whether to join is available here and here.