The 2002 Lectures in Computer Science:
The Data Avalanche: Reducing Information Overload

About

All aspects of society have the blessing and curse of exponentially more information.

At the personal level we are blessed with hundreds of eMails, instant messages, pages and mobile telephone calls each day.

We are always accessible and are always receiving unsolicited input.

Conversely, is the death of privacy. They know where we are and what we are doing online.

At the societal level, every field is drowning in an avalanche of scientific advances -- there are exponentially more scientific papers and scientific data.

We deal with this by becoming more and more specialized so that we can keep current with the ever-growing knowledge in our shrinking field of study.

We need help in limiting and summarizing and prioritizing the information avalanche.

This lecture series brings together scholars from many disciplines to talk about the data filtering, data analysis, data summarization, and data mining techniques that might address this problem and also to discuss some of the broader societal issues associated with the information avalanche.