Plumbing the data: Leaders share ideas

InformaticsMaryland conference draws 230

Friday, Dec. 1, 2006

Doing business in the Information Age depends on informatics, the science of gathering, analyzing and using data.

And in this region, the vast informatics systems of 70 different federal agencies have a lot to do with how companies do business, according to Steve Walker, managing partner of Walker Ventures, a venture capital firm in Glenwood.

That’s why Walker put together the first InformaticsMaryland conference Tuesday in Linthicum. The event drew 230 information technology leaders from government, universities and business.

The conference featured opportunities for businesses to license new informatics technology. It also provided insight on industry’s needs and explored public and private research and development activities.

‘‘By bringing together a set of pioneering computer scientists, industry executives, and state and federal government officials, the conference set the stage for a continued academic-corporate-government partnership that has the potential to make Maryland the world leader in massive data management,” said V.S. Subrahmanian, director of the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.

The conference theme was that the size of an agency’s database is not as important as how the agency uses it.

Walker said ‘‘it would be nice” for federal laboratories and area universities to share how they use common informatics techniques. Those methods include data mining and knowledge discovery that ‘‘everyone seems to use” to find nuggets of information in massive databases.

Informatics is used in a multitude of fields, including medicine, biotechnology, chemistry, geosciences, engineering and even social sciences and communications.

The conference was sponsored by the Maryland Technology Development Corp., Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development and several county economic development agencies.

Frank Mayer, CEO and president of Tresys Technologies in Columbia, called it ‘‘a synergizing meeting.” Tresys, with 50 employees, helps solve clients’ IT security problems. Mayer was one of several industry presenters at the conference.

‘‘We got a chance to share what we are doing and see what we don’t usually see” beyond his IT security domain, Mayer said. ‘‘I don’t do data mining, for example.”

But, he said, listening to presenters from federal laboratories helped him recognize similar problems and future solutions.

‘‘They want to help people mine their data without compromising secure data,” Mayer said. ‘‘I can take that data mining idea to help prevent people from mining it.”

Walker said the conference worked.

‘‘What we tried to do, and I think succeeded in doing, was to get folks from all over the region to realize that the techniques many of them are using are similar and there are significant benefits to working with each other,” he said.

Walker also heads the Informatics Coalition, which is devoted to promoting the region’s ‘‘impressive resources.”

‘‘There are so many resources in this region, more science, than anywhere in the world mostly because of the fed presence,” he said.

But as a natural result of bureaucracy, that overarching presence has created little incentive for the agencies to work together in informatics, Walker said.

‘‘Lots of agencies — NIH, NASA, NIST and 70 others — are working their own separate ways in informatics,” he said. ‘‘They are each doing it on their own budget and work structure, but they don’t realize what each other is doing.”

The conference featured 24 experts from agencies, prominent computer colleges and informatics businesses in the region, each limited to 10 minutes. Walker speculated that each speaker is associated with ‘‘about 10 or 12 business contractors.”

The effect was a sort of a rapid-fire clearinghouse of techniques and uses, said Stephen Halperin, dean of the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematics and Physical Sciences at College Park.

‘‘The conference, which was Steve [Walker]’s vision, was to do a panoramic snapshot of informatics in the state and where we were headed,” Halperin said.

The most appealing part of the conference, Halperin said, was that he and a handful of other professors became ‘‘the providers of information to the business community” and were not just talking with other academics, as they usually do.

‘‘It was only a first step, though,” Halperin said. ‘‘Now we need to do a lot more, I think, because we did not yet figure out how to best find and serve the needs of the business community.”

Walker, Halperin and other organizers will analyze feedback from attendees before organizing two more conferences in the near future.

Walker said he got the idea for the conference from Eric Haseltine, former director of research for the National Security Agency, who made a series of speeches on the need for federal agencies to share their informatics techniques.

There is much to be learned, Walker said, from how international, multi-agency projects organize and share data, such the 400 million astronomical objects being cataloged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or the billions of bits of genetic data in the Human Genome Project.

‘‘People can look at how the human genome data is shared and find ways to do this kind of data mining in other fields,” Walker said.