The $60 million NSA-funded Laboratory for Analytic Sciences has received national attention for the association between the government agency and a University, but more importantly, it has become a model for the type of interdisciplinary research it conducts, according to Randy Avent, an associate vice chancellor for research development and the principal investigator of the lab.
The announcement of the collaboration between N.C. State and the NSA, which took place last August, came only a few months after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents about the agency’s methods of wiretapping and surveillance.
Almost a year later, the research the lab conducts spans across many of the colleges at the University and has funded about 90 research grants.
“The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the United States,” Avent said. “The NSA has enough mathematicians, statisticians and engineers. What they’re really looking for are researchers in the humanities.”
Avent said the agency is now looking to tackle problems in a new, multidisciplinary way.
Thirty-five percent of the funded research is being conducted by researchers in the College of Engineering. However, the second-largest college in terms of research grants is the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which represents 13 percent of the research funding.
CHASS has a larger section of the research contract than the College of Sciences, which is home to many of the school’s data analysts, mathematicians and applied statisticians.
“Our work is more about ‘how do people make decisions?’ than ‘what is the topological analysis of that set of data,’” Avent said. “What separates a good analyst from one that is not so good? Is it the tools? Is it the workflow? How much value is there in analysts collaborating?”
Avent said big-data-problems have long been a challenge for the U.S. government.
“Big data has been a hot topic for the defense department many, many years,” Avent said. “How do you exploit the data and make decisions? The NSA came to the conclusion they were making slow progress, and wanted to try something different. They wanted a new set of people, and they decided to go to the university to get a taste of the innovative thinking that goes on there.”
The emphasis of the laboratory’s projects concentrate much more on a technique called narrative processing, which is understanding how events and ideas can lead to different outcomes rather than complicated math problems, according to Avent.
Avent said these problems are analogous to analyzing a script of a movie, learning all of the details of the characters and their motives and then analyzing what likely endings would be.
“We’re going to do our homework better than we’ve ever done it before,” said Michael Wertheimer, the director of research at the NSA to WUNC, regarding the laboratory’s work. “Read the newspaper. Pick any headline on the front page and ask what’s going to happen tomorrow. What’s the headline tomorrow? And if I can answer that right, I can change what that headline’s going to be. And hopefully for the good.”
Avent said hard problems, such as those dealt with by the analytics lab, are more interdisciplinary and require more people to be involved with solving them than mathematicians alone.
“It’s not all about analysts,” Avent said. “How do graduate students go about solving their theses? What tools do they use? What separates a graduate student who is successful in his thesis from one that is not?”
