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IU statistics professor Stanley Wasserman points at the map of the “Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem” from the New York Times that he has tacked to his bulletin board.
“Networks are hot,” he says.

Social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, have pervaded almost every aspect of our society –they help us make friends, get jobs, and now, thanks to a new military effort, they could help us catch terrorists.

The project, sponsored by the U.S. Army, will urge researchers, including two professors at IU, to come up with new ways to analyze data surrounding networks. The project is designed to aid military operations, including anti-terrorism efforts, and to explain how knowledge is spread between peers in the modern military, according to the IU press release.

“They want to be able to understand networks better, all kinds of networks,” said Wasserman, one of the IU professors on the team. “To understand how people interact and how individuals are connected.”

The Army Research Laboratory Project is a $35.5 million collaboration that involves researchers from 10 different universities and organizations nationwide and will span 10 years, according to the same release.

“This grant project is very unique,” said Alessandro Vespignani, the second IU researcher. “We will reevaluate how to progress every year; it will involve a lot of recalibration and close monitoring from the army.”

The two IU professors – Wasserman, chairman of the Department of Statistics, and Vespignani, professor in the School of Informatics and Computing – have received grants to work on the project, $850,000 for the first five years and a similar amount for the next five.

Other universities involved include Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Notre Dame.

According to Wasserman, the development of the project has been three years in the making and was inspired when the Army decided it needed help interpreting mass amounts of data.

Wasserman said a Jan. 10 New York Times article, “Military is Awash in Data from Drones,” pinpoints the military’s current problem that spawned this project: an overload of data-producing technology and a lack of efficient means to interpret it.

He said the military needs to know what type of data to look at, which types of data are associated with each other and they need software that can analyze this.

“A lot of it is about who is connected to whom,” Wasserman said. “Who mentions who in particular blogs and how information gets percolated through different channels of communication.”

The two IU researchers will have a small team of graduate students helping them with the project. Currently Vespignani has seven students in his lab, but he anticipates more.

Wasserman and Vespignani said they feel lucky to have IU as their research base. Wasserman said IU is now a big center for network research.

“There are probably more people at IU doing research on networks than anywhere else in the nation,” he said.

Dean of the IU School of Informatics Robert Schnabel commended the program as well.

“It is the case that IU has a strong program in network research,” he said. “It is interesting how many different areas network research can be involved in, very interdisciplinary.”

Research for the project is set to begin any day, as the first year plan is being finalized, Vespignani said.

“I look forward to starting work with my colleagues, to interact with them and work on data,” he said. “It is an interdisciplinary collaboration and the study is crucial for the understanding of our world.”