The Defense Sciences Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Dr. James Caverlee and Dr. Xia “Ben” Hu a Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) grant to complete their collaborative research project, HELIOS, named after the Greek god with the ability to see the invisible.

Along with being a part of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) Center for Digital Libraries, Caverlee is an associate professor and Hu is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.

The HELIOS project aims to create new computational methods and algorithms to fill in the gaps of rapidly evolving spatial-temporal datasets, which are datasets that measure both space and time. These types of datasets are generally missing information, which prohibit accurate assessments of time and location.