The objective of this workshop is to bring together PIs and co-PIs currently in their second year of a research project funded by the Information, Integration and Informatics Program at the National Science Foundation along with selected industry and government invitees to discuss current research, as well as identify and elaborate on current challenges and future directions.
The growth in scale, diversity and complexity of data has increased the demand for understanding and effectively utilizing large amounts of heterogeneous data. The Information Integration and Informatics (III) program focuses on the processes and technologies involved in creating, managing, analyzing, visualizing, and understanding heterogeneous data, information and knowledge in order to enable intelligent actions throughout the knowledge life cycle. Given the III focus, the workshop goals include: (1) Analyzing the research and development issues of problems that are fundamental in making progress toward understanding complex data, information, knowledge and processes; (2) Specifying current and new areas where major breakthroughs appear possible; (3) Identifying needed collaborations (e.g., inter-disciplinary, academic-industry, international, inter-agency); and (4) Identifying research initiatives and facilities needed to meet current and future challenges.
The workshop is expected to have a significant impact for the participants and the broad Information, Integration and Informatics (III) research community. The participants will have an opportunity to explore fruitful collaboration and synergism by sharing accomplishments, providing demonstrations and interacting with each other. Workshop discussions will also focus on the objectives, contributions and challenges of major research activities funded by the Information, Integration and Informatics program and future research directions and activities for the III community. The workshop results, including new research directions that will be identified will be broadly publicized to the research community through publications and the workshop website (http://cs.georgetown.edu/NSF-III-2010/). The results dissemination is expected to inform and motivate III research community in their research, collaborative and education activities, and spur other innovative research directions.
Traditionally, Information Integration and Informatics (III) has been an important area across a broad array of applications in research and industry, and because of the huge growth in disparate data sources and "big data", the area is quickly growing in importance. The growth in scale, diversity and complexity of data has increased the demand for utilizing and understanding large amounts of heterogeneous data. In addition, many new opportunities are emerging because of new application areas like social networks, healthcare, climate change, the economy, policy analysis, and others. There are also new constraints, e.g., reduced energy footprint, privacy, sustainability, etc. In April 2010, Georgetown University and University of Maryland, College Park hosted a two day NSF sponsored workshop that brought together approximately 85 participants currently in their second year of funding from the III program at NSF along with selected industry and government invitees. The primary goals of the workshop were to identify current and new areas where major breakthroughs are possible, determine research initiatives, programs and facilities needed to meet current and future challenges, share research results, and foster new collaborations. A number of areas and themes with broad implication within and outside of computer science surfaced at the workshop, including the following: The need for a more integrated view of structured and unstructured data, in which structure can be leveraged to improve the presentation of unstructured data and unstructured data can be leveraged to extract structured data; The growing importance of geo-coded information, socially annotated information, and other ‘behavior trace’ data; Interest in methods that can reason about uncertainty, provenance, and trust across different layers, from the data sources to the end users; The need for real-time data integration, data independent query processing, and flexible query optimization; Concern for usability and the need for information visualization and visual analytics; Interest in developing heterogeneous data management solutions for non-programmers; A need for standards and the development of the ‘next generation’ of cloud computing; Ideas for incorporating energy consumption as a key optimization metric in data management and data processing; Interest in incorporation of incentive design under realistic conditions and for new application areas; Techniques for enabling e-science through better support for Science Commons type initiatives; Recognition of the importance of understanding temporal changes in heterogeneous data sources; Interest in understanding how to develop algorithms and systems that can deal with, and possibly benefit from, the rapidly increasing diversity in the computing hardware; Concern for privacy across new application domains. Along with these ideas, future areas of research, recommendations for future programs and lessons learned for future workshop organizers were integrated into a final workshop report. The report, along with information about the workshop, presentation slides from the workshop, and participant information can be found at http://cs.georgetown.edu/NSF-III-2010/.
