DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, has a long history of bringing together groups of researchers with different interests and backgrounds, to study and advance the state of the art in discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, statistics, operations research, and related areas, as well as their applications in a wide variety of domains including telecommunications, homeland security, the physical sciences, engineering, and public health. DIMACS's signature activity is a "special focus" (SF), a multi-year program of coordinated activities involving hundreds of diverse participants and addressing a broad, important topic that is poised for rapid advancement and has high potential for scientific, industrial, and societal impact. The project consists of the following three interacting SFs:
1). Information Sharing and Dynamic Data Analysis: The ability to instrument, monitor and collect data provides huge potential to improve life: designing better systems, better managing interactions between large complex systems, identifying subtle problems and bad outcomes. More work is needed to realize systems that span multiple, diverse, noisy data sources and use them to correctly draw conclusions and make decisions. The SF addresses data preparation and quality, privacy and security, continual and distributed processing, and fusion and inference, exploring applications in areas including web search engines and online social networks, healthcare, urban planning and traffic management, and homeland security.
2). Algorithms and Energy: It has become a major national and global priority to maintain a robust supply of energy that meets the demands of a growing economy and balances costs and environmental constraints. Themes of the SF are multiscale temporal models, multiscale spatial models, risk and reliability measures, data representation and model sharing, and stochastic optimization that can contribute to our ability to analyze new dynamic energy pricing algorithms, optimize investments in energy generation, storage and transmission, manage a dynamic new power grid, and analyze plans and protocols for electric vehicles and green information technology.
3). Cybersecurity: New emerging networks and applications raise more than ever the challenge to provide security and privacy in a world where everything is connected via wired or wireless networks. SF themes address critical infrastructure systems such as the power grid, applications with a high societal, industrial and governmental impact such as the changing landscape of cyber attacks, mechanisms for identity management, security for new paradigms like cloud computing, and fundamental studies such as cryptography, information theory, and coding theory.
These three SFs will lead to a great deal of research activity, including significant new scientific accomplishments and significant new directions of scientific research. The project has significant potential benefit to society: improved capabilities to handle diverse, dynamic data in turn enables advances in medicine, homeland security, commerce, and other areas; improving and diversifying the energy infrastructure helps maintain affordable access to energy while mitigating the environmental costs of doing so; and improvements in cybersecurity are needed to ensure that we can justifiably rely on systems we use throughout our daily lives. The project also enhances educational programs for students and faculty from K-12 to graduate students.
