ABSTRACT

Center Name: Center for Science of Information
Center Director: W. Szpankowski,
Lead Institution: Purdue University

The foundations of modern communications and ancillary trillion plus dollar economic windfall were laid in 1948 by Claude Shannon who introduced a general mathematical theory of the inherent information content in data and its reliable communication in the presence of noise. While Shannon?s Theory has had a profound impact, its application beyond storage and point-to-point communication, e.g., to the Internet, poses fundamental challenges, among the most vexing facing today?s scientists and engineers. The overarching vision of the proposed Center for Science of Information is to develop a new science of information that incorporates common features generally associated with data/information, such as space, time, structure, semantics and context that are not addressed by Shannon?s Theory. The realization of this vision requires a center-level environment that can focus the efforts of a sizeable (and diverse) group of researchers, for a protracted period of time, on these critically important challenges, which could have far reaching societal impact and enormous economic ramifications. Under the umbrella of this overarching vision, the proposed center will explore the following fundamental issues: (i) modeling complex systems and development of analytical techniques for information flow (e.g., understanding Darwinian selection); (ii) quantification and extraction of informative substructures in complex systems (e.g., discovering functionally relevant structures in gene regulatory networks or modular entities in social networks); (iii) understanding of spatio-temporal coding used to exchange information through timing and localization in complex systems (e.g., building more efficient ad hoc networks and understanding neuronal activity); (iv) data-driven knowledge discovery based on formal information-theoretic measures (e.g., finding semantically relevant information in unstructured repositories); (v) steganography, data obfuscation and hiding as mechanisms for robustness (e.g., developing secure systems for monitoring and surveillance); and (vi) discovering principles of redundancy and fault tolerance in diverse natural systems (e.g., understanding the interplay between erasure coding and distributed system design).

The intellectual merits of the proposed center include the community of students and academic and industrial scholars it seeks to sustain, the theoretical advances it hopes to achieve, and the novel insights and tools it hopes to provide to explicate a myriad of diverse systems, ranging from the life sciences through business applications. The broader impacts of this Center extend beyond the potential scientific, societal and economic ramifications and include the creation of an ?active and thriving community of students and scholars? who will train the next generation of scientists and engineers, enlighten the public, and ultimately pave the way for the next information revolution. The Center team is composed of over 40 investigators, many having already made significant accomplishments in multiple research areas relevant to the Science of Information. The Center team is a very diverse group: it has a mix of junior and senior researchers, including several members of underrepresented groups. They bring expertise in all essential areas of research, including Computer Science, Chemistry, Economics, Statistics, Environmental Science, Information Theory, Life Sciences, and Physics. The institutional partners include nine premier institutions (Purdue, Bryn Mawr, Howard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCSD, and UIUC), two of which have significant underrepresented student populations. The academic institutions are complemented by the Center?s industrial partners (Amgen, Bell Labs, Configuersoft, Google, HP, Lilly, NEC, Qualcomm, and Yahoo) and by world-renowned researchers at international institutions.

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