NDSU computer scientist researches big data
Published October 26, 2015
An NDSU computer science professor will spend the next five years developing better data-mining methods thanks to a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award.
Wei Jin, assistant professor of computer science, has received up to $498,433 for research that could affect the biomedical and health care industries, homeland security and aviation safety. NDSU graduate students also will gain real-world knowledge of data mining by helping with the project.
The CAREER program recognizes junior faculty members for outstanding research, excellent teaching and the ability to combine education and research to further the mission of their university.
“The goal of my research is to explore automated solutions for sifting through these extensive document collections to detect interesting links and hidden information that connect facts, propositions or hypotheses,” Jin said.
Right now, people only find information within individual documents when they do an online search. Searches match keywords and rank documents, but can’t find hidden relationships across several documents.
NDSU assistant professor Wei Jin earned a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award to develop better methods to find hidden connections from large document collections in multiple domains.
The amount of written material online is growing rapidly, which makes it challenging for analysts to find connections.
Jin hopes to develop a search system that finds links across multiple documents. Her method also will attempt to include relevant information from each Web page and Wikipedia to complement or enhance existing information.
The research project will allow four graduate students to gain hands-on experience with information analysis and discovery. Jin also will develop a series of data mining courses to introduce students to text and web mining research.
Jin has been an assistant professor in computer science at NDSU since 2008. She received doctorate and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering from State University of New York, Buffalo.
The research is funded by Award No. 1452898 from the National Science Foundation.
