SCIENCE

The center will explore emerging frontiers of information science to develop a set of principles extending information theory to integrate the elements of space, time, structure, semantics and context.

"The center brings together world-class scholars from top universities to collectively develop a comprehensive science related to how information is extracted, manipulated and exchanged," said Richard Buckius, Purdue's vice president for research. "The team will attack these problems by rigorous theoretical studies driven by critical real-world problems in domains as diverse as biology, social networks and computer communication networks. The outcomes promise to be transformative, just as development of reliable and affordable digital communication transformed 20th century life."

Wojciech Szpankowski (pronounced "Voi-check Shpan-cow-vski"), Purdue's Saul Rosen Professor of Computer Science who leads the project, said the team hopes to create formal methodologies, algorithms and computation tools to assist in analysis and modeling for the life sciences, communications, financial transactions and patterns of consumer behavior.

"Whether it is a neural network or a social network doesn't matter when you examine it mathematically," he said. "Much more knowledge can be gleaned from these networks and databases than what we are able to achieve with our current analysis methods. Through a better understanding of information and information exchange, we can create algorithms that can be applied to problems in a variety of disciplines."

The Purdue center is one of five new NSF Science and Technology Centers chosen from 247 preliminary proposals. The NSF's Science and Technology Center program supports integrative partnerships that require large-scale, long-term funding to produce research and education of the highest quality, said NSF director Arden L. Bement.

"These five new STCs will involve world-class teams of researchers and educators, integrate learning and discovery in innovative ways, tackle complex problems that require the long-term support afforded by this program, and lead to the development of new technologies with significant impact well into the future," he said.

Purdue is partnering with Bryn Mawr College; Howard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Co-principal investigators for the project are Madhu Sudan of MIT, Sergio Verdu of Princeton, Andrea Goldsmith of Stanford and Bin Yu of UC Berkeley.

The five-year award will be used to create a science of information hub to allow the research team to collaborate and easily share information. In addition, the hub will serve as a resource for industrial partners, students and the broader community, Szpankowski said.

The team also will establish an undergraduate course in the science of information, where students will have opportunities to interact with top faculty from the partner universities as well as leading private sector scientists, he said.

Information theory, established by Claude Shannon in 1948, finds the limits of compressing, reliably storing and communicating data. It made possible computers, the Internet, DVDs and the iPod. However, Shannon's theory needs to be extended to take into account the influence of space, time, structure, semantics and context on information, Szpankowski said.

"A second, post-Shannon, revolution is needed in order to make substantial progress in important applications such as biology, economics, physics and business," he said. "We aim to work with industry to eventually develop long-term technological solutions. Before we start building a new technology or creating new software, we have to understand the fundamentals."