January 1, 2007 The Wright Brothers Institute, near the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, established the Tec^Edge Innovation and Collaboration Center in Dayton, Ohio. The facility fosters communication, coordination, cooperation and collaboration among high school, undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers and industry experts with the goal of innovation in technology, science, and education. For the second year in a row UALR students and faculty from the Entity Resolution Information Quality Lab were invited to attend Summer at the Edge (SATE). SATE is a fast pace and highly innovative program in which new ideas and concepts for solving complex problems in both the military and civilian fields are generated and a proof of concept is demonstrated at the end of the program. One of the big advantages for the Air Force is that the Tec^Edge program is “outside the fence” meaning that the students don’t have to be US citizens or have special security clearances to participate.
This five part news series will focus on the work and experiences of the UALR graduate students who participated in the2010 summer program. These include three doctoral students, Isaac Osesina, Yinle Zhou, and Yusuf Yiliyasi; and two master’s students Kamilia Messaoudi and Soukaina Messaoudi. Faculty mentors from UALR included Mariofanna Milanova from Computer Science, and Edi Tudoreanu, Serhan Dagtas, and John Talburt from Information Science.
Our first spotlight is on Isaac Osesina, a doctoral student in the IQ program, who worked with a Tec^Edge team to design and implement a prototype to analyze and visualize free text. Text mining within the enterprise is quickly becoming a valuable resource in areas like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI). Employers are looking to leverage existing information, but because of the quantity of the data available, the ability to find the knowledge within textual information can be a daunting experience. The team’s concept allows one to visualize the data to get a better understanding of a user’s associations and trends of key events.
Isaac and his team researched several data sources (e.g. internet relay chat sites, blog posts, tweets, and public record sites, such as LexisNexis) to track relationships, events and key words over time. The team also developed a time-dependent word cloud and frequency maps within the prototype to allow for a more efficient analysis of the data.
When asked about the Tec^Edge program and working on the project, Isaac said, “When motivated, it is unbelievable how much one can achieve in such a short time period.”
Isaac is also working on a prototype to visualize Twitter data in a GIS environment, which is also being sponsored by the US Air Force Research Laboratory Sensor and Human Factors Directorates at Wright Patterson Airbase. For more information about the Tec^Edge Summer at the Edge program visit http://www.wbi-icc.com/
