Contact: Maridith Geuder
Anyone who has used the Internet to search for a specific topic knows all too well that search engines may return hundreds of thousands of possibilities.
New research being coordinated by Mississippi State University is aimed at developing an infrastructure to make the process easier and more precise.
A $2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center is supporting a project designed to improve the way humans interact with network systems to acquire information.
"The Defense Department, which has a large training and education component, wants to assure that effective instruction is taking place on the Internet," said Richard D. Koshel of MSU's Center for Educational and Training Technology.
Koshel is co-director of the center, which is leading the research effort that includes a subcontract with the University of Hawaii. In noting that more than half of the grant money will remain at Mississippi State, he expressed appreciation to Mississippi's congressional delegation for "being very supportive in bringing this project to our state."
The MSU research team will include faculty members in education, physics and engineering. "Monumental" is Koshel's description of the task they and their University of Hawaii colleagues face.
"The Internet is experiencing explosive growth, with the amount of information doubling every 18 months," he said. "It is our goal to create a system than enables the average Internet user to pull together very specific information efficiently."
Currently, finding appropriate instructional material on the Internet can be a laborious process. A teacher typing in a single keyword can generate enormous lists of Internet sites, most with limited descriptions. Visiting each site to verify usefulness can be tedious and unfruitful.
Koshel said the ultimate goal of the MSU-led project "is to develop a 'smart' system" that includes a synthesizing feature to automatically take advantage of information in various databases throughout the world.
"This is called a distributed environment," he explained. "We want to be able to pull together information from distributed information environments and automatically select needed resources."
The technical infrastructure to create the sense of ease "will be very complex," Koshel emphasized. However, designing such a system would reduce the complexity of developing multimedia, online training and educational material.
"Our effort is laying the groundwork for the future system," he said. "We hope this will be a prototype that can be used by business and industry as well."