SBIR Phase II: Automatic Information Awareness

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project proposes to study and implement a large-scale information awareness system which will fuse, present and provide an alert as to the existence of newly available information from large bodies of documents based on each user's profile. The amount of information available electronically has been growing at such a rate that it is not only impossible for people to identify the nature of the information content as it is made available, but it is even more out of the question for people to absorb the actual information content. Thus, awareness of and synthesis of the content of information has now become the real challenge. This project will enable users to specify their interests and to detect new information trends matching each individual user's interests, based on the relevance and importance of newly available information. By extracting information from unstructured texts, categorizing it, and fusing it, each user will be presented with a unique view of the content. Teragram profiler technology allows users to specify information needs for the future. It will provide an alert mechanism based on user specified interests contained in user profiles, measurement and formulation of information speed, volume, decay; and fusion of information found in multiple documents. Such techniques will enable the next generations of information retrieval systems in which information will be tailored to the users' interests thus enabling easy access to relevant information found in large repositories.