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A team of UCSB computer scientists is part of a consortium chosen to establish an Information Networks Academic Research Center (INARC) by the US Army as a part of its Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA). The information networks multi-campus collaborative effort is led by the University of Illinois, and also includes IBM and City University of New York. The total effort will be funded at about $16.75 million, of which the UCSB team will receive approximately $3.6 million.

The Army has also awarded three other academic research centers under the NS CTA: Social Networks, Communication Networks, and Integration, to integrate the work of the three network-type-specific centers. The four Centers will work in close collaboration with each other and with Government researchers.

The grand challenge of NS CTA is to develop science that enables the modeling, design, analysis, and prediction of behaviors of networks, and to develop fundamental underpinnings to enable humans and networks of disparate information sources to discover and optimize information and knowledge from the full range of structured and unstructured sources.

The objective is to perform foundational research on network science, leading to a fundamental understanding of the interaction among the social/cognitive, information, and communication networks in a given environment. Specific goals of the Information Networks Center are to systematically develop the foundation needed for information networks including:

entity identification, information extraction, and data integration and uncertainty characterization of multimodal data; construction and access of information network systems; structural and statistical analysis of networks; knowledge discovery in information networks, and; robustness, reliability, and trustworthiness of information.

The UCSB team includes Ambuj Singh (Computer Science, Principal Investigator), Xifeng Yan (Computer Science), Tobias Höllerer (Computer Science), and B.S. Manjunath (Electrical & Computer Engineering). Contingent upon available funding, the Army expects to support the entire Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance for five years, with an option for an additional five years.