National Security Grant to UMass Researcher Focuses on Rapid Response and Information Technology

Nov. 17, 2004

AMHERST, Mass. - Anna Nagurney, the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has received a one-year, $198,904 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), through funds provided by the National Security Agency (NSA). The grant will fund research into how information technology can streamline processes for organizations, such as national intelligence agencies, that must respond rapidly to incoming knowledge, dynamic situations, and uncertainty.

Nagurney will conduct the research along with June Dong, a professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, who earned her doctorate from the Isenberg School in 1994, and their team of students at the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at UMass Amherst. They will be working with the American Productivity and Quality Center in Houston, Tex., which will be providing them with data for dynamic knowledge-intensive organizations such as major news organizations, high tech companies, and global financial institutions against which they can test and validate their models of knowledge supernetworks.

The team is one of nine selected nationally, including those from Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University. The ultimate goal is to combine the results of the various groups to enhance decision-making in dynamic knowledge-based organizations that can also be applied to national intelligence agencies. The teams presented their preliminary results at a Management of Knowledge Intensive Dynamic Systems (MKIDS) workshop held in Baltimore in September. The UMass team also hosted a mini-workshop in September for the NSA site visitor.

The funding provided by the grant will also help to support the New Supernetworks Laboratory for Computation and Visualization at the Isenberg School. Next summer, Nagurney and a student funded by the grant, Tina Wakolbinger, will be presenting an invited workshop on knowledge supernetworks at the International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organisations in London, England.

Nagurney is also the director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, and editor of the book, “Innovations in Financial and Economic Networks,” just released by Edward Elgar Publishing of Northampton, Mass., and Cheltenham, England.

Contact Anna Nagurney at 413/545-5635 or nagurney@gbfin.umass.edu.

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