$650,000 Google Research Grant for Singh Program in MKSE |
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March 15, 2011,
Volume 57, No. 25
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The Rajendra and Neera Singh Program in Market and Social Systems Engineering (MKSE) has received a $650,000 research grant from Google for the proposal, “Enabling the Next Generation of Highly Dynamic, Inter-Domain Data-Centric Markets and Systems.”
The proposal hopes to address the idea that Internet services, whether search engines, social networks, location-based services, recommendation systems, or ad placement services, currently operate over static “snapshots” of the world, not considering the dynamic changes that are actually going on even as the computations are occurring. They also tend to work only over the data available to their host Internet company, rather than incorporating the greater knowledge that might be available if multiple organizations shared data. Moreover, they have limited understanding of how to manage privacy in data-centric settings.
The issues of how to handle dynamic information and relationships, how to handle the very large-scale processing of historical and live data, and how to support access, control, and privacy of data across and within Internet domains, are at the core of the planned research in market and social systems engineering. Efforts will include a combination of research conducted by faculty, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers, as well as activities involving undergraduate students in the Singh Program. Undergraduate students will participate in designing data-centric experiments that evaluate hypotheses; testbeds that aid in the teaching of key material; the development of data-centric programs; and evaluations of different algorithms and mechanisms.
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