CIIC

We believe that the most significant innovations in information technology happening today are in the realm of connected information. This rather broad research effort involves the search for fundamental principles of information organization, the construction of infrastructures that facilitate this process of creating new connections and the ‘dissolution’ that must precede it.

Using link analysis to generate page rank for web search engines is an example of leveraging connected information. So is the concept of a ‘mashup’. Social networking and social network analysis involve capturing and understanding connected information. Even statistical natural language processing uses the connections between words to extract meaning.

All of these are examples of synthesizing something new by connecting information that was created for some other purpose. We call this process of breaking information free of its original context and combining it in new and unanticipated ways “Dynamic Dissolution and Recombination”.

The Connected Information Innovation Center is dedicated to understanding this process. We are also committed to building infrastructures that facilitate both dissolution and recombination of information. Finally we are working on developing a variety of services that leverage infrastructures that we, and others, develop.

Current Areas of Work

• Novel architectures facilitating dynamically and intelligently combining information from heterogeneous data sources. This is currently being applied to facilitating search and to intranet portals.
• Statistical language processing in an effort to develop new kinds of ontological understanding without human intervention, and then build services based upon that understanding.
• Understanding and modeling collective user behavior in P2P networks. P2P dynamics are becoming increasingly significant in the architecture and economics of the online experience.

The notion of content without a container has been paradoxical. But today, with the digitally enabled freedom to break free from one context and be applied in countless others, content has left its container behind. We are trying to understand and shape the implications of this new reality.