UIC RESEARCHERS TACKLE COLOSSAL WEB DATA

Note to reporters: demos are available by appointment.

If all goes as planned, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago will revolutionize data management with their data space transfer protocol (DSTP) in the same way that HTTP revolutionized the Internet.

Providing an easy way to mine enormous amounts of data, DSTP will allow users to pull information from a variety of sources and get instantaneous analysis. Anyone from students to engineers will find uses for this open technology, according to Stuart Bailey, the senior engineer at UIC's National Center for Data Mining. "DSTP makes data publication, access, and analysis as easy as point-and-click," said Bailey.

Emory Creel, a research programmer in the National Center for Data Mining uses Hollywood as an example: "Let's say you want to look at a certain movie's income and you have a DSTP server feeding you information. You can instantaneously compare receipts from its revenue in, say, Tokyo and Vancouver." Statistics, daily income and virtually all facets of that movie's production can be analyzed in mere seconds.

Similarly, DSTP will enable scientists to pull material from numerous other research labs and compare findings globally. Or reporters will be able to look at statistics on homelessness in Miami and Chicago from June 1988, for example, and compare them with current statistics instantly. The applications are seemingly endless.

UIC's National Center for Data Mining has won numerous awards for its' work and is becoming a national focus point for data mining activity. Awards include: the Most Innovative of Show award at Supercomputing 1998 for work in distributed data mining; the Gold Medal for Innovation at Supercomputing 1996; and the High Performance Computing Challenge award for distributed data mining at the Supercomputing 1995 conference. Bailey hopes for a repeat performance at this year's annual supercomputing conference, to be held Nov. 13-19 in Portland, Ore.

"There's much more data than there are people who have the educational background to work with that data," said Bailey. "So we're providing tools and infrastructures so that anybody can use data to get interesting and valuable information."

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