This award supports Professor Amar Mukherjee of the University of Central Florida for visits to New Zealand, where he will work with Professor Tim Bell of the University of Canterbury, and to Australia, where he will work with Professor Alistair Moffat of the University of Melbourne. A companion proposal (INT-0301896) supports his U.S. colleague Daniel Adjeroh of West Virginia University for the same objectives. These visits are intended to initiate a program of faculty exchange visits and graduate student mentoring in the Computer Sciences. Their core research was recently funded by NSF grant IIS-0312484, "Compressed Search and Retrieval for Very Large Text and Image Repositories."
The recent explosion in the amount of multimedia data typically available to an ordinary computer user has made it crucial to find new ways to manage massive amounts of data. These investigators are developing new methods for organizing, storing, searching and retrieving data more efficiently. Their work involves a new approach to data compression that uses "sorted contexts", which permits searching for specific information within data files that are still compressed. They are developing both new compression schemes and new search methodologies for working with such compressed data.
This research will have significant applications in both science and engineering research and in societal needs such as electronic libraries, internet search engines, homeland security, economic, environmental and medical data bases and many other forms of text and image repositories. In addition, several graduate students are involved in the project and will benefit from exposure to state-of-the-art research being done outside of the U.S.
