ULL planning research center
LAFAYETTE — Industry demands and needs will drive research in the new Center on Visual and Decision Informatics launched by a partnership between University of Louisiana at Lafayette and Drexel University in Philadelphia.
The two universities were awarded funding recently from the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Center program to launch the center.
Through the NSF program, Drexel received a $55,000 grant and ULL an $80,000 grant for their initial phase, according to the NSF program website.
Continued NSF grant funding will be pursued, said Vijay Raghavan, a distinguished professor in computer science and ULL’s principal investigator.
The center will assist businesses and state agencies, Raghavan said.
“They collect a lot of data and often, if it’s not organized and processed properly, then a lot of times, the data is not available for decision-making,” Raghavan said. “We want to provide through our research new technologies (so) our member companies can better use the information and make better decisions with their information.”
As part of the grant proposal process, both universities received letters of commitment from 13 companies and Louisiana and Pennsylvania state agencies interested in becoming members of the center, including Lafayette-based Stuller Inc., Louisiana Departments of Revenue and Health and Hospitals, Microsoft Research and Johnson & Johnson.
The fee for industry membership is $30,000 a year, with those dollars directed to research, Raghavan said.
The industry partners or members will each have a seat on the center’s industry advisory board and make decisions on which projects the research team will focus.
The approach is nontraditional from universities’ typical flow of research, said Ramesh Kolluru, director of ULL’s Center for Business and Information Technologies, who will serve as a liaison between the new center and industries.
“Historically, universities have adopted a push model: We do the research in our labs and create innovation, and then look for partners and vendors in the marketplace,” Kolluru said. “This is a model that turns that thinking on its head.”
The industry advisory board will “drive the research agenda,” he said. “This is needs-driven or user-driven from day one.”
“At the end of the process, they have the ability to take this intellectual property into their organization and translate (it) into useful products or services that they provide,” Kolluru said.
The center has the potential to impact workforce and economic development, ULL President Joseph Savoie said in a news release Wednesday.
“This initiative, which maximizes an organization’s ability to evaluate and analyze complex data, has tremendous potential,” Savoie stated. “A recent MIT study showed that companies that adopted data-driven, evidence-based decision making increased their productivity 5 to 6 percent, compared to companies that did not. This approach can enhance companies’ ability to compete in the global marketplace.”
The collaboration will prepare the “next generation of data scientists to confront Big Data challenges,” stated David E. Fenske, dean of Drexel University’s iSchool.
The center pairs ULL’s School of Computing and Informatics with The iSchool at Drexel, which specializes in information systems and digital library science.
The universities’ complementary fields of expertise made them logical partners for the project, Raghavan said.
“They specialize in information science whereas we specialize in the visualization of structured data,” he said.
Kolluru said the center is the first of its kind in the state.
The university reported in a news release Wednesday that the new center joins an “elite group” of only 16 Computer Information and Engineering centers in the country, but is the only one focused specifically on visual and decision informatics research.