Iowa State’s fledgling CyberInnovation Institute has brought together five campus research and application centers on the ISU campus.

James Oliver, director of the CyberInnovation Institute and professor of mechanical engineering, said that one of the aspects of the institute’s mission was to consolidate all of Iowa State’s “[information technology]-related research centers and folks who could take advantage of the institute to make us more competitive for big research opportunities.”

As an example of this ethos, he said he works with a defense-related contract that spans multiple areas of research.

“The military applications have information security aspects and data mining aspects with problems and opportunities that span our expertise,” Oliver said.

Basically, it’s bringing together people with diverse information so that they can share data, and “that’s where the cyber-innovation comes in,” he said.

Karen Gulbrandsen, graduate student in English and communications coordinator for the institute, said the institute had just been approved in May by the Board of Regents.

“The idea [is that] people and researchers can solve problems better if they work together,” Gulbrandsen said. “Sometimes, to solve problems, you need specialists in different areas.”

She said that the institute brings together students, faculty and industry leaders.

According to a press release, the institute uses one third of the old Engineering Animation Inc. building in the Iowa State University Research Park, and Gulbrandsen said this space is already being utilized by entrepreneurial companies.

Doug Jacobson, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the information assurance center, said the CyberInnovation Institute was brought together in response to the Battell report in Iowa that addressed the direction of the economy.

“I think that one of the big advantages is that it’s trying to create this partnership between academic, industrial research and economic development,” he said. “So it’s really trying to help the state, help the country, and it’s kind of exciting to get the different players together that are working on cyber here on campus.”

According to a press release, the CyberInnovation Institute is going to use the approximately $1 million in state funding to create new companies and industrial collaborations and to help influence the amount of research funding that the university receives.

Krishna Rajan, director of the Combinatorial Sciences and Materials Informatics Collaboratory and professor of materials science and engineering, said that the National Science Foundation classified cyber-infrastructure research a “major area of investment for science in general.”

He said the CyberInnovation Institute is based on the concept of sharing information and data and that there is a lot of research going on in generalized research fields that would benefit from collaboration.

“So you need these kinds of people who are working in very different areas to get together and learn each other’s needs,” Rajan said.

For instance, he said, the Institute of Combinatorial Discovery has developed “around people and ways of experiments which can very rapidly generate large amounts of data.”

The CyberInnovation Institute allows the Institute of Combinatorial Discovery’s researchers to be paired with different types of research, analyzing and screening large amounts of data.

Rajan said this arrangement allows learning the “language and mechanics of other disciplines” and can help in their careers.