The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Drexel University have established 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.
Vision
The Center for Visual and Decision Informatics serves to drive continuous innovation through knowledge sharing among partners leading to invention and commercialization of decision support technologies.
Mission
The Center’s mission is to research and develop next generation visual and decision support tools and techniques to enable decision makers in government and industry to fundamentally improve the way their organization’s information is interpreted and analyzed. CVDI will bring together, analytic, visual and perceptual techniques by advancing the state-of-the-art in the research fields of Information Visualization, Visual Analytics and Automated Analysis. This research will be supported by advanced computing and visualization facilities to create Decision-Making Environments (DME) – a framework that will enable users to explore and customize information streams in a variety of modalities to gain better insight to that information.
Goals
The Center’s goals are 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.
