Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

We live in an age of information overload, and in the area of commercial airplane safety and maintenance a vast amount of text is produced every day in the form of natural language, which may yield information vital for safety analysts. However, information in free-form natural language text is difficult to process by machine, and we need effective tools for human-computer interaction for the analysis of text data. Analysts in many different disciplines need computational tools that help them navigate through massive text data sets and find specific nuggets of information. Our project will produce an improved Visual Analytics software system specifically designed for visualization in large text data sets. We will focus on a particular public safety application of this research that will benefit industries involved in commercial airplane safety studies, in particular our industrial partner in this project: AeroInfo Systems and The Boeing Company. Our research will produce a Canadian presence in the field of visual analytics and our software can be extended to support investigative analysts at all levels from financial report analysis and criminal cases to national security and defence which are of vital importance to Canada.