Other Awards and Honors
2009 Awards
Jim Thomas Receives Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation 2009 Homeland Security Award
Jim Thomas was recently awarded the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation 2009 Homeland Security Award at the US Capital. This significant honor recognizes his international leadership and outstanding scientific achievements in founding and establishing the growing science of visual analytics and the numerous associated technologies that aid in detecting, predicting, preventing, and responding to acts of terrorism.
Jim's scientific leadership in visual analytics has resulted in the emergence and deployment of new information technologies critical to our nation's security. Visual analytics innovations developed under Jim's leadership have been deployed to national and regional analysts and first responders at a number of homeland security agencies and organizations. For example, the Scalable Reasoning System has provided law enforcement investigators with visual tools to discover patterns, trends, and relationships when and where it matters most—where lives are at stake. This technology has been deployed to front-line law enforcement and counter-terrorism personnel at the San Diego area Automated Regional Justice Information System (ARJIS), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and the Seattle Police Department. The ARJIS Executive Director described this capability as "critical" to officers on the ground.
Other deployed science enables understanding and management of our critical infrastructures e.g. power grid, cyber analytics to detect intrusion and other attacks on our communication networks, financial analytics to detect fraud and money flows, pandemic analytics to detect and plan for likely flu expansions, immigration analytics on applications to speed processing while enabling better detection of potential terrorists, to a host of intelligence applications through visual analytics of blogs and open source information in multiple languages with text, images and video.
This technology also provides far more effective analytics for applications such as energy, environment, economy, health, finance, and other critical parts of our society to every day access and dealing with masses of information on the Web. A unique capability has been developed under Jim's leadership to build test data sets with embedded threats (ground truth) now being used through international contests by IEEE that allows researchers and industry around the world to test and measure their technology, turning Jim's vision into a calibrated science enabling our knowledge workers to detect the expected and discovery of the unexpectedTM.
Equally important to the contributions Jim has made to this scientific field, he has played a critical visionary role in educating our next generation of scientists and engineers. He has led the development of a series of visual analytics workshops and tutorials at the university level. He has inspired degree and certificate programs, academic research programs and classes, workshops, summer camps, and faculty fellowships. His impact on future generations of visual analytics researchers helps ensure a steady pipeline of discoveries and technology solutions that can address homeland security challenges.
These advances would not be possible without the critical funding support from the Science and Technology Directorate of Department of Homeland Security, other members of the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense, U.S. National Science Foundation, our international partners protecting freedoms around the world and the professional society IEEE for providing the international science forums to build, publish and calibrate these new technologies.
Congress established the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation in 1992 to "encourage and support research, study and labor designed to produce new discoveries in all fields of endeavor for the benefit of mankind." Each year, the foundation honors American citizens who improve the world through scientific endeavors. Recipients are selected from hundreds of nominations and are chosen by a panel of science, policy and other experts. (announced 9/1/2009)