Information Systems
Head of this cluster: Martin Kersten
Secretary of this cluster: Irish Hesp
Phone: +31 (0)20 592 4058 Fax: +31 (0)20 592 4312
The research activities of INS focus on various aspects of information systems. Important output of the work is the development of prototypes for demonstrating and experimenting with solutions. The policy regarding their construction is to develop them up to the point that real applications can be built and to support the take up through open-source communities. The work mostly addresses the challenges posed by the data explosion but part of the research relates to earth and life sciences.
INS0 - Standardization and Knowledge Transfer
Group leader: Martin Kersten (Martin.Kersten@cwi.nl)
The activities in this group are organized in two dimensions: coordination of World Wide Web activities and development of standards. They play a leading role in coordination and scientific direction of W3C standards.
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INS1 - Database Architectures and Information Access
Group leader: Martin Kersten (Martin.Kersten@cwi.nl)
The amount of data managed by database systems and accessed through information retrieval systems is enormous. Information retrieval technology of this group focuses on strategies for structural information retrieval. The scalability issue is addressed using adaptive algorithms at the heart of a modern database system.
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INS2 - Interactive Information Access
Group leader: Lynda Hardman (Lynda.Hardman@cwi.nl)
The research goal is to support human users in obtaining correct information from the huge amounts available, in the appropriate amount, relevant to the task in hand and presented in the appropriate way. The challenge is to develop methods to explore and confirm models of storage, selection, organization and presentation of information.
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INS3 - Visualization of 3D Interfaces
Group leader: Robert van Liere (Robert.van.Liere@cwi.nl)
Scientific computing is a rapidly growing field and scientists are critically dependent on interactive visual data analysis techniques. This group's focus is to study visualization methods that combine the exploratory nature of discovery with the quantitative nature of science.
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INS4 - Quantum Computing and Advanced Systems Research
Group leader: Harry Buhrman (Harry.Buhrman@cwi.nl)
Quantum computers use quantum mechanical effects to drastically and fundamentally speed up certain information processing tasks such as computation, simulations of physical systems, and communication. The researchers develop new algorithms and protocols, and establish the inherent limitations thereof by means of general techniques in the form of no-go theorems.
The work in machine learning and statistics focuses on the realistic case in which all available models describing the data are wrong, still some are useful though, in the sense that they lead to reasonable predictions. This group theoretically analyses this situation and develops new algorithms for it, based mainly on the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL). MDL states that the best theory for explanation for the data is the one that allows for the shortest description of the data.