A group of UMBC faculty members was recently awarded a 4-year, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant totaling $1.8 million to pursue work with “Global Collaboration Engine” (GLOBE), a “globally relevant search engine.” “Our objective is to change the way land change scientists do business,” explains Dr. Erle Ellis, associate professor of Geography and Environmental Systems, and the Principal Investigator for the grant.

Ellis explains that GLOBE will allow land change researchers to quickly and easily harvest expertise from a range sources. “People working locally will use that connection to think globally about their work in a more quantitative way.”

Along with Dr. Ellis and Dr. Wayne Lutters, associate professor of Information Systems, the research team includes Computer Science and Electrical Engineering professors Dr. Tim Oates, Dr. Tim Finin and Dr. Penny Rheingnas, all Co-Principal Investigators for the grant who are responsible for the computing elements of the project.

“It’s sort of like Facebook,” says Dr. Oates of GLOBE, which, in addition to consolidating papers and case studies, includes a social networking component to allow researchers to communicate and collaborate with one another.     

The GLOBE project began as an idea broached at a small conference dedicated to linking global and local land change. In the summer of 2009, Ellis looked to UMBC’s Computer Science faculty to find collaborators with expertise in computing. “From my point of view, I was really impressed with the depth and breadth of the computing expertise at UMBC,” says Ellis.

Then, a year ago, the research group received initial funding from Geoff Summers, Vice President for Research at UMBC, through the Research Seed Funding Initiative (RSFI). “The seed funding was very important,” says Ellis. The funding enabled the group to develop a prototype before submitting a second proposal to NSF after the first was rejected.   

In addition to GLOBE’s anticipated impact on land change science, the project will also make contributions to the field of Computer Science by way of machine learning algorithms. “What we want to do is to be able to watch people use the system and figure out what their workflow is and then be able to use that information to help novices make better use of the system,” says Dr. Oates, who has previously done research involving workflow analysis through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project and is excited about applying those ideas to the GLOBE project.

GLOBE is also being applied to the field of Information Systems with the help of Dr. Lutters who is assessing the usefulness of the system by comparing how researchers study land change now to how it will be done when GLOBE is in place.  

Ellis anticipates that GLOBE will take at least two years to complete, with a working version expected within a year. Though it is designed to support the land change science community, GLOBE will be available for free online and has the potential to become an essential tool for researchers in other disciplines (archaeology, for example) and students.

Alexander Morrow is a Sophomore majoring in Computer Science. His research explores predictive model uncertainty. To learn more about Alexander's research, read his research profile.

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