Leading-edge computer technologies for organizing, analyzing, and disseminating large natural history data sets will be developed at Cornell University, with a $2.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation to the Laboratory of Ornithology, in partnership with the Department of Computer Science.

The four-year project is expected to produce new techniques for interactive exploration and analysis of massive, spatio-temporal data collections. Natural history collections represent one of the largest, longest-running data sets in existence.

“These data hold the answers to many biological questions that cannot be answered without more sophisticated tools to organize and analyze the information,” says Steve Kelling, the ornithology lab’s information technologies director and a principal investigator (PI). “The funding provided by NSF will allow us to build those tools by bringing together the expertise of computational specialists, population biologists, and statisticians, with the goal of making the data sets accessible to researchers, conservation biologists, educators, and
citizens.”

Co-PIs at the Lab of Ornithology are John Fitzpatrick and Wesley Hochachka. Rich Caruana, an assistant professor of computer science, and Mirek Riedewald, a computer science research associate, also are co-PIs on the grant.
Says Caruana: “This grant will allow us not only to develop and test leading-edge data mining, machine learning, and modeling techniques, but to integrate these methodologies with the ornithology lab’s existing projects. The project has the potential to greatly increase the power and scope of these data tools and the ability of researchers everywhere to better understand what the natural history data are telling us.”

—Allison Wells
Cornell News Service