Purdue Awarded Funds for State's First NSF Science and Tech Center

Purdue has announced that they were recently awarded $25million by the National Science Foundation to create the first NSF Science and Technology Center in the state of Indiana.  The center’s charter says they will explore the new frontiers of information science to “develop a set of principles extending information theory to integrate the elements of space, time, structure, semantics and context.”

The center brings together world-class scholars from top universities to collectively develop a comprehensive science related to how information is extracted, manipulated and exchanged,” said Richard Buckius, Purdue’s vice president for research. “The team will attack these problems by rigorous theoretical studies driven by critical real-world problems in domains as diverse as biology, social networks and computer communication networks. The outcomes promise to be transformative, just as development of reliable and affordable digital communication transformed 20th century life.”

The Purdue center is one of 5 chosen from a pool of 247 submissions.

These five new STCs will involve world-class teams of researchers and educators, integrate learning and discovery in innovative ways, tackle complex problems that require the long-term support afforded by this program, and lead to the development of new technologies with significant impact well into the future,” [Arden L. Bement] said.

Purdue is partnering with Bryn Mawr College; Howard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  For more info, check out the new website here.