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By Tim Stoddard
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Ogi Ogas Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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Earlier this month, Ogi Ogas, a Ph.D. candidate in the CAS department of cognitive
and neural systems (CNS), was appointed one of 100 new Homeland Security fellows.
The fellowship is administered by the Department of Homeland Security, and
is open to undergraduates and graduates involved in research applicable to
intelligence-gathering and domestic security. Ogas (GRS’06) is studying
the human brain’s ability to pick out unusual patterns from vast quantities
of data. “All of our work is inspired by the brain,” he says. “We’d
like to develop computer programs that mimic the brain, and we’re finding
ways to apply these programs to real-life problems.” In the war on terrorism,
the FBI and the CIA are seeking faster and more accurate methods of data-mining,
or extracting anomalous patterns from huge data sets. With his advisor, Gail
Carpenter, a CAS CNS professor and director of graduate studies, Ogas is developing
data-mining software that can better distinguish the unusual from the usual,
including tasks such as identifying faces in a crowd or picking out suspicious
keywords from millions of e-mails or visa applications.
The fellowship allows
him to focus on his research by providing full tuition
and fees for the 2003–04 academic year as well as a monthly stipend. “I
was deeply affected by the events of September 11,” Ogas says. “So
I was very pleased to learn that my research could be applied to homeland security
needs. This fellowship lets me pursue my interest in the basic sciences and math
in a way that will help the country’s antiterrorism efforts.”
26
September 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations