Researchers at seven U.S. universities are putting their heads together to help the Department of Defense come up with a better way to make sense of all the data its computers collect. The DoD has awarded the schools, led by the University of Washington, a 5-year, $6.25 million grant to deliver a solution.
“A complex monitoring system has far too many pieces of information for any one person to look at,” said principal investigator Pedro Domingos (left), a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering, in a statement. “This award lets us do the research to develop a system for the military to look at all the available information that might be valuable and use it to predict behavior.”
The system will need to sort through everything from data collected by sensors on soldiers to satellite images.
The University of Washington says that whatever technology the schools cook up will be made available not just to the military but to the public as well.
Researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Texas, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, the University of Rochester and MIT will also take part in the project, handling areas such as recognizing activity from human movement and machine reasoning. (A look at other multidisciplinary university research initiatives )
