Researchers Present New Data Mining Technique
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jan 12, 2007

Dartmouth engineers George Cybenko and Vincent Berk have said that process query systems (PQS) are the way to go to make sense of the huge volume of data collected each day from computer network monitors, video surveillance cameras, financial transaction records, databases of email exchanges, etc.

They have presented this case in a paper published in this month's IEEE Computer, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Computer Society magazine.

"PQS closes the gap between gathering a tremendous amount of valuable data and figuring out what the data means," says Cybenko, the Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering.

The engineers say that PQS is a useful and incredibly powerful tool to quickly analyze credit reports for ID theft, discover attacks on computer networks, and measure activity at, say, national borders, mall parking lots, or wildlife refuge areas.

It is based on the premise that sensed environments, be they computer networks, email traffic, or high-security buildings, all consist of processes with distinct states, dynamics, and observables. PQS works to detect and understand the changes or irregularities in these processes.

"I think the most interesting application of PQS to date is in network security monitoring," says Vincent Berk, research associate and lecturer at Dartmouth's Thayer School. "Network administrators have many options when it comes to monitoring tools, however none of them are integrated; and, while all of them produce useful information, it's often in hugely impractical quantities. PQS brings together the information, and effectively focuses on the most important issues first."