Multi-Modal Information Access & Synthesis
The MIAS Center, designated a Center of Excellence in information research, performs research on advanced methods for information analysis and decision science.
Most of the world’s information is unstructured: text, images and sensory data. Accessing it in a meaningful way and extracting relevant content is inherently difficult – relevant concepts may be expressed in a wide variety of ways. The MIAS mission is to develop the theories, algorithms, and tools for analysts & researchers to access a variety of data formats, integrate unstructured data with existing resources, and transform raw data into useful & understandable information.
MIAS aims at extending the state-of-the-art and develop new technologies for:
- Focused data retrieval and integration, to identify and collect relevant data from multiple modalities
- Semantic data enrichment, to allow navigation and search across disparate data modalities and augment knowledge bases by inferring semantics from unstructured data and images
- Entity identification and relationship discovery, to identify real-world entities and relate them to existing institutional resources
- Knowledge discovery and hypotheses generation and verification, to construct the rich semantic structure and hidden networks of entity linkages
- Fundamental machine learning, database and data mining, natural language processing, and computer vision techniques required for and driven by the aforementioned problems.
The educational mission of MIAS is to develop diverse human resources to enhance the scientific research, educational, and governmental workforce in MIAS disciplines. Educational initiatives have been developed to encourage computer science students in universities with small research programs, particularly those that are minority serving, to pursue graduate studies at stronger institutions, where they can make a bigger impact on the field, and to expose them to national labs. Key to this effort is the Data Sciences Summer Institute, a comprehensive education program designed to increase participation in the study and practice of MIAS topics.
Learn more about MIAS at www.mias.uiuc.edu.