U. researchers meeting with NSA on data mining work

SALT LAKE CITY — When the National Security Agency's new information storage center is up and running at Camp Williams, there will be a lot of numbers to crunch. For help, the NSA may turn to a local source: a University of Utah professor who has come up with a simpler, faster method of "data mining."

Suresh Venkatasubramanian, assistant professor of computer science, will present his method Wednesday at an academic conference in Washington, D.C. As the government, researchers, social networking sites and businesses gather more and more information, it's becoming a mammoth task to sort through it all.

It's a paradox, he said. "You want a richer description of your data, but you pay for it. Every time you add a dimension, it slows you down that much more."

Venkatasubramanian's research has found a way to reduce the variables in any data set to zero in on its most important elements. "For certain problems, only some characteristics matter," he said. For example, if you know a man's height, you can make a reasonable guess about his weight.

Psychologists have actually used a similar approach to reduce the "dimensionality" of data since the 1930s. The professor said that while current computer programs struggle to analyze data from 5,000 people, his program smoothly handles information from more than 50,000.

Data mining is commonly used online to churn out Amazon.com recommendations, Netflix movie ratings and suggestions on Facebook. But it's also a fundamental part of the NSA's cryptology efforts.

Richard Brown, dean of the U.'s College of Engineering, has met several times with the NSA and has another meeting planned this week. He said the discussions have focused both on potential research collaborations with faculty at the U. and on recruiting students in relevant academic programs.

"They would like to hire graduates from the U. who have exactly the right background to operate a huge supercomputing data center like this one will be," Brown wrote in an e-mail. "The relationship is moving forward very nicely."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is expected to pick a contractor for the $1.9 billion, 120-acre facility by October. The first stage of construction should take about two years.

The Military Installation Development Authority of Utah has already secured a multimillion-dollar contract to develop a master plan for power, water and sewer infrastructure at the site.

e-mail: pkoepp@desnews.com