New Software's Goal: Connecting the Dots

By Jon Van Published February 5, 2005

Information technology's many advances--e-mail, instant messaging, wireless phone calls and so on--leave many feeling a bit overwhelmed. And that's just from personal correspondence.

Imagine the predicament of financial analysts and security agents spending their days poring over mountains of data input trying to find patterns.

Because information overload is a product of technology, one can count on technologists to invent a solution. There are several software available intended to help people sort through data to extract meaningful information. But these programs mostly address static data stored in databases, a field called data mining

Computer wizards at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications have taken this assistance to a new level with software that helps to analyze not only static data, but also dynamic data.

So e-mails, daily reports, even data generated by sensors, can be sifted through along with material stored in databases. The results bring everything together on one desktop screen--sliced and diced various ways to help the analyst make sense of it.

The software is intended to find things that appear to fall outside normal activity and single out these anomalies for attention. This on-the-fly analysis should be especially important to homeland security folks seeking to spot terrorist activity before it happens and to financial analysts looking for investment opportunities.

"This doesn't just do text searches, it shows connections between different data events," said Brian Buck, chief technology officer of RiverGlass, based in West Chicago. RiverGlass is a start-up company that seeks to commercialize and market the new software.

University of Illinois computer scientists have a reputation for brilliance, but their work's commercial potential has mostly been exploited outside the state. They invented the concept of the Web browser, for example, but the first product was marketed by Netscape in California.

The new technology may be as revolutionary as the Web browser, said Kirk Dauksavage, RiverGlass' chief executive, who is determined to make it an Illinois success story. The start-up not only has local funding behind it, but it has an open-ended relationship with the NCSA so that future technology developed there can flow into the RiverGlass products.

The company aims to sell its technology to large enterprises, such as government agencies and financial institutions. It is working with some potential customers now to tailor the software and hopes to have product commercially available within six months.

"This will boost analyst productivity significantly," said Dauksavage.

There are no immediate plans for products aimed at individuals or small businesses, but they could become part of the mix down the road as the technology evolves, said Buck.

Lobby closing: By purchasing AT&T Corp., SBC Communications Inc. will be eliminating a major lobbying force that opposed it before legislators and regulators at the federal and state levels.

Small competitive telecom companies that cannot afford to hire lobbyists often relied on AT&T's clout to push their interests. But losing that ally may not be a big deal, said Bill Capraro, chief of CIMCO Communications Inc., a competitive carrier based in Oakbrook Terrace.

"When we had AT&T with us in issues against SBC, the problem was that lawmakers tended to view it as a fight between two giant companies," said Capraro, who serves on the board of a competitive industry trade group. "For the last year or so, the small companies have pushed our points without any help from big guys. We miss their lobbying dollars, but we want to speak for ourselves."

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