By Andrew Plemmons Pratt

Professor Donald Brown, chair of the Department of Systems and Information Engineering Department, is a busy man. Within the past few months, he has received a Research Achievement Award from the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society, developed a system for tracking geographic crime data, and won a $750,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.

The Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society and the Intelligent Transportation Systems Society of the IEEE granted Brown the Research Achievement Award at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics in May, in recognition of his "sustained contributions in the area of security and intelligence informatics."

Brown's research in data fusion and data mining has wide-ranging applications, from medical information processing to transportation security to crime mapping. It is this last field that came into play in his developing of GRASP, the Geospatial Repository for Analysis and Safety Planning.

GRASP

Law enforcement agencies across the country keep spatial data on criminal activity and public safety. This information is as simple as the location of bars and schools or as precise as the tracking of gang-related activity. But, as Brown points out, "Every law enforcement agency manages its records differently." Some agencies are advanced in their record keeping, maintaining electronic databases of spatial information. Others may simply have wall maps dotted with colored pushpins. But regardless of how advanced a given agency's system is, chances are that the system will not be integrated with any other system, even with that of the agency next door. This becomes particularly problematic when criminals cross jurisdictional boundaries, as happened in the case involving Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo .

Translating information from one system to another is enormously inefficient and time-consuming. "It's complicated enough that agencies just don't do it unless it's something

incredibly important, like the sniper incident," sa ys Brown. "And in that case, they couldn't do it. They ended up not being able to translate information between any of the different jurisdictions." Because the electronic mapping systems in the Washington-area agencies were incompatible, each had a piece of the puzzle, but no efficient way to put them together.

Developed with the support of the National Institute of Justice, the GRASP system is a Web-based repository that translates the electronic information from multiple jurisdictions into a common format. It won't take another gruesome crime spree for GRASP to prove its usefulness. "Whether it is tackling ordinary crimes or gang-related violence, GRASP can help officials understand the spatial significance of crimes over a large region," Brown says. The system has already been tested in Charlotte, N.C., and Baltimore County, Md. Plans are under way for testing in the San Francisco Bay area.

The W. M. Keck Foundation Center for THz Spectroscopy for Biological Materials

While GRASP represents the systems engineering approach to a large communication problem, Brown's work as the principle investigator on the Keck grant will be research on the molecular level. The three-year grant provides funding for establishment of the W. M. Keck Foundation Center for THz Spectroscopy for Biological Materials, where seven University faculty members and a team of graduate students will work to develop a device for using the terahertz spectrum to study biological molecules.

A well-honed device for terahertz spectroscopy will allow for exploration of the structure and interactions between drugs and enzymes and between the molecules that transfer genetic information. Previously, researchers in this field have not been able to study these processes at the terahertz frequencies because no devices existed for making the measurements. Electromagnetic radiation in the terahertz range is above infrared on the spectrum and just below visible light, existing in a "terahertz gap" in which existing devices cannot accurately measure it for spectroscopy.

"It's a device gap that has translated into a knowledge gap," says Brown. "The idea is to build a device that can start to explore properties of biological molecules we haven't been able to reach in any other portion of the spectrum." Currently, infrared spectroscopy has been a primary method for analyzing these sorts of molecular structures. Brown explains: "We've pushed infrared about as far as it will go and there are some open questions about how the three-dimensional structures in proteins form and about how they transform. We can't get what we need out of the infrared."

This is more than just a design project. The grant proposal offered a timetable for completing a prototype of the device within 18 months using a systems approach developed by Professor Brown for optimizing the construction of complex devices. "We hope that in the first year and a half, we'll actually have the first version of the machine

built," says Brown, "so that we can start generating the real data out of it and know what we need to do to adjust it to get even more improvements." After that, the group will have another year and a half to analyze results from the new device.

The Keck Foundation provides funding for work that advances fundamental understanding of scientific processes in either the Medical Sciences or in Science and Engineering. This is the first Science and Engineering grant for the University of Virginia.

In addition to Brown, the research team includes Professor Michael DeVore of the Systems and Information Engineering Department; Professors Tatiana Globus, Robert Weikle, Thomas Crowe and Boris Gelmont of the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Professor Lukas Tamm of the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics.