This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop several software products dealing with the analysis of stochastic point processes for use in basic electrophysiology and behavioral neuroscience, as well as in fields dealing with higher aspects of human behavior such as mental health and alcoholism treatment relapse issues. Although not specifically targeted, because of the ubiquity of the subject matter, we anticipate considerable usage by researchers in Epidemiology and other medical fields, and even in diverse fields such as electrical engineering, forensics and operations research. The software will focus on the analysis of single and paired event data, i.e., single or multiple lists of the times that events of a particular type occur. The algorithms selected for inclusion in the program will include some of the better- known existing algorithms for point processes, as well as selected, recently developed algorithms in this area. The software will be for the PC platform and distributed in the form of a stand-alone windows application, as well as DLL's and scripts to allow inclusion of the functionality in existing software products.
The proposed software will be a research tool that should have wide marketability within the target research communities. In addition, because of the complete lack of comparable software this software has the potential to penetrate the much larger non- specialist market.
