Dr. Catherine Blake named RENCI Faculty Fellow

Dr. Catherine Blake, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science (SILS), has been named a RENCI Faculty Fellow for 2007.

Blake, who is already working with the RENCI visualization group, will start the fellowship in July 2007 to pursue research on "Claim Jumping through Scientific Literature." Amongst other things, the award will provide financial support for a SILS student and the computing power required to more than double the size of Blake's current collection of scientific articles. "Most importantly," said Blake, "the project will include articles from domains other than chemistry which will enable me to really demonstrate how text mining can be used to bridge between scientific disciplines."

The RENCI Faculty Fellows program was established to enable faculty to explore new research opportunities and directions, translate ideas into technology prototypes, develop new community service or educational programs, and to develop interdisciplinary projects that combine the arts and humanities with science.

Blake has been a faculty member in SILS faculty since January 2004. She teaches courses in Text Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Databases, and Information Tools. Her research interests include text mining, information synthesis, multi-document summarization, recognizing textual entailment and paraphrasing, information extraction, and meta-analysis.

RENCI, short for the "Renaissance Computing Institute," is a "major collaborative venture" of UNC at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University and the state of North Carolina. Its mission is to foster multidisciplinary collaborations and advancements in many fields through the use of world-class computing technologies.

The Faculty Fellows Program is one way RENCI fulfills its mission. The program is "designed to catalyze new activities or projects not eligible or suitable for funding from traditional sources."

Faculty fellows will have access to RENCI high-performance computing, storage, visualization and data management/analysis capabilities, and sensors and hardware prototyping capabilities. They will work in partnership with RENCI staff and research scientists to realize the goals outlined in the faculty member's proposal. Fellows will have resources to explore and develop new opportunities and multidisciplinary collaborative projects. They will be able to use advanced technologies that RENCI creates and deploys to support discovery, collaboration, education and innovation.