Education

Welcome

The goal of the Center for Multimodal Information Access and Synthesis Center (MIAS) at UIUC is to develop the fundamental theories, computational models, algorithms, and tools for analysts to access a variety of data formats and models, to integrate them with existing resources, and to transform raw data into useful and understandable information, in support of productive and efficient analysis. We aim 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.

Our educational mission is to develop diverse human resources to enhance the scientific research, educational, and governmental workforce in MIAS disciplines. Our 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

More information about the MIAS center and its faculty can be found in this presentation. You may also refer to this one-page summary of the center.

News

5/1/2009

Professor Dan Roth elected Fellow of AAAI

Professor Dan Roth, director of the MIAS Research Center, is a newly elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. AAAI is the premier artificial intelligence professional society. Each year, a small number of distinguished AI researchers are elected AAAI Fellows by the membership of AAAI for their unusual distinction in the profession and for their sustained contributions to the field for a decade or more. This election recognizes Professor Roth as one of the foremost researchers in the AI community. A formal press release is forthcoming and will be made available on the AAAI website at AAAI News Releases