Finding Better Ways to Extract Clues to Terrorist Activity
By Greta Petry
The events of 9/11 have underscored how important it is for United States intelligence agencies to be able to extract pertinent clues from vast amounts of routine information in order to track terrorists.

University researcher Tomek Strzalkowski, head of the Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies, is working with his colleagues around the world on various projects to do just that. The institute, reporting to the vice president for Re-search, is located in the Social Sciences building.

Interim Vice President for Research Peter Bloniarz said, “The country is very fortunate to have researchers of the caliber of Professor Strzalkowski and his colleagues to conduct research that addresses important national needs. The direct connection to practice also allows the Institute’s researchers to develop innovative solutions to practical problems. Both sides benefit from this relationship.”

Strzalkowski’s main research area is information intelligence.

“You try to extract useful facts from the massive amounts of information you are being hit by every day,” said Strzalkowski, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Warsaw University; earned a Ph.D. at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, British Columbia; and taught at New York University prior to joining the Department of Computer Science at UAlbany three years ago.

“I am building an application for the intelligence community for people whose job it is to look at information coming from anywhere that may impact on national security,” said Strzalkowski.

Intelligence analysts sort through foreign affairs information that may come from numerous sources and in many different languages; they need to zero in on pertinent facts in order to brief government and military officials on the latest developments.

“The challenge here is to digest this much more quickly than any human being can,” said Strzalkowski, an associate professor of computer science who also worked for the General Electric R&D Center.

While human analysts can read reports and make decisions as to the relevance of a bit of information, people are likely to have trouble remembering seemingly unrelated bits of information gleaned from hundreds of reports. Yet connecting these small pieces may be essential to building a case, whether it pertains to tracking terrorist activity or, if you are a police investigator, organized crime.

“Essentially it means being a detective, a Sherlock Holmes, and remembering a piece that you read a week ago. This is where the computer can help: Computers can remember things forever and make the connections,” Strzalkowski said. “You have to develop methods of fast detection - the computer cannot decide what is bad news, but it can alert you that it may be problematic. As an analyst you need to spot things that are worth looking at while avoiding information that is not relevant.”

The key information may not pop up when the analyst types in one word in an Internet search. How does one find the pertinent clues that are not found straight on target, but on the margins?

Strzalkowski is building an automated question-answering system that would help analysts flesh out seemingly unrelated information around the edges of a problem; when added together, these facts may yield hypotheses not considered before. The system is called High-Quality Interactive Question Answering, and is funded by the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) under the AQUAINT program, which develops advanced tools for intelligence analysts.

For example, the analyst types in this question:

“Tell me what is being done to curb the production of opium in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.”

The computer can be programmed to respond to this question, providing related and marginally related information. With an automated interactive question-answering system, a dialogue occurs, and while organizing existing information on opium in Afghanistan, the computer also finds information on another drug that is a growing problem.

“It gives the analyst the whole picture,” Strzalkowski said. The computer will not overlook information because of personal bias.

Another system that has already been built summarizes long articles into briefs containing the most important facts. One can also obtain a summary of hundreds of articles in a brief time period.

“Ask it to summarize and provide a digest, and it will follow through,” he said. “This is an extremely important time-saving device. It can tell you either there is nothing new here today, or here is what is happening today.”

Called the Cross-Document Summarizer (or XDoX), it can take a 24-hour stream of broadcast, wire, and text news from around the world, from CNN, NPR, NBC, the AP wire, and international news from Chinese, Russian, and French news sources, for example, and condense it into a summarized version.

“It would be impossible for any person to sit there and follow all of these news services 24 hours a day. This service would pull out from the stream the topic you need,” Strzalkowski said.

The institute’s research is funded by about $4 million from a variety of sponsors, including the ARDA; the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); the European Commission; the National Science Foundation (NSF); U.S. Department of Education; and the Office of Naval Research.

In one automated call center project for the Department of Defense, there is dialogue between the computer and a caller. “We are part of the DARPA BABYLON program, which is developing multi-lingual human-computer dialogue and translation capability. My part of the project is not concerned with translation; others are working on translation,” Strzalkowski said.

“Our project Automated Multilingual Interaction Information and Services (AMITIES) is unique because of our European partners,” he said.

The automated call center project involves partners from Duke University; the University of Sheffield, England; the French National Research Laboratory CNRS--LIMSI; and financial call centers in England, France, and Austria. Rather than offering a menu of automated options that may or may not suit their needs, it engages the caller in a human-like conversation, answers the caller’s questions, and initiates some standard database operations. This service can also be applied to banks for transferring money to accounts, as well as in customer service departments. “The service is designed to operate initially in three languages: English, French, and German. And you can even change the language in mid-conversation, for example, go from English to French, and the system will follow you,” Strzalkowski said.

Information security is another large part of the institute’s work. With grants from the NSF and the U.S. Department of Education, the institute is developing an information security laboratory, which will be used for research and teaching by students; faculty in computer science, business and other disciplines; and New York State agencies.

Rozett ‘Constructs a World’ of New Historical Fiction
By Greta Petry

Martha Rozett /Photo by Joseph Schuyler

Martha Rozett’s new book Constructing a World: Shakespeare’s England and the New Historical Fiction (SUNY Press 2003, $21.95) takes a fresh look at an old genre that is experiencing a comeback.

“If you look at the new book displays at bookstores, you’ll see a dozen or more innovative historical novels set in any number of times and places,” she said. “This genre seems to satisfy our need to escape from the present into an often exotic and vividly imagined past.”

Rozett, a professor of English, Shakespearean scholar, and Collins Fellow, said historical fiction began reinventing itself in the early 1980s with Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which inspired the title of her book. By the mid-1990s, innovative historical novels like Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Beloved by Toni Morrison had become bestsellers.

Rozett is teaching New Historical Fiction, including some of the novels she writes about in Constructing a World, to a class of junior and senior English majors this semester. “They are learning things their history courses never dealt with,” she said, “and they seem to be enjoying it.”

Writing on a scholarly subject with encyclopedic knowledge and a clarity that makes the book accessible to the general reader, Rozett probes this new historical fiction and finds it differs from the old in distinctive ways.

Since the days of Sir Walter Scott, who is “generally regarded as the father of the historical novel” (Waverly, published in 1814, and Kenilworth, 1821) the classic traits of the genre have been imaginary characters and a plot woven around one coherent version of an actual historic event. Whether or not Scott was true to the exact chronology of historical events, there was one accepted version of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and he does not tamper with it.

Today, however, new historical fiction is apt to play with differing points of view of the same historical event, fracturing the cohesiveness of that moment in time and yet making it more realistic because of the multiple perspectives of the players as well as those who lived on the margins of history.

What drew Rozett to this genre in the first place?

“About 10 or 12 years ago, I realized that I could turn my avocation - reading historical fiction for fun, instead of watching television - into a vocation, particularly since popular genres and non-canonical texts were attracting increasing attention from scholars in English departments,” she said. So Rozett started reading more systematically, and trying out some of the novels on her students to see if she could acclimate them to the diction and material culture of Shakespeare’s England. She began to realize that very little had been written about historical fiction, unlike science fiction or film. “This led me to think about how I could combine my experience as a Shakespearean scholar and teacher with my interest in how new genres emerge. It has helped that I have had a couple of graduate students who share my interest, as well as friends who tell me about the novels they are reading,” she added.

Though the focus of the book is on Shakespeare’s England, broadly construed, it also draws on many other novels set in a variety of periods in order to develop a working definition of “the new historical fiction.”

Rozett cites authors George Garrett (Death of the Fox: A Novel of Elizabeth and Ralegh, Entered from the Sun) and Anthony Burgess (Nothing Like the Sun, Shakespeare, A Dead Man in Deptford) as examples of novelists who are steeped in the diction, syntax, and details of the time period about which they write. Like painters, they recreate the life of the time with these bits and pieces, filling in the blanks of history here and there, ending with an image that looks real.

Garrett is “a magician with a wand of words, a conjurer who brings his subject to life more vividly than the biographers, for all their considerable narrative and synthesizing skills” (Constructing a World, p. 66).

Shakespeare’s England is particularly susceptible to reinvention by new historical fiction. Rozett notes that his plays are themselves historical fictions, and that scholars who have tried to tamper with his versions of English history have been met with resistance, even when they were right.

Two examples of authors who reimagined Shakespeare’s plays are Edith Pargeter, who wrote A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury, and Robert Nye, author of Falstaff. The two use “entirely different historical fiction strategies, for each novel is descended from a discrete lineage of fiction writing with its own conventions and posture toward the hypothetical reader. However, both novelists presume upon the reader’s familiarity with the plays and thus critique, interpret, and embellish the documented historical accounts from which Shakespeare and his contemporaries derived their understanding of the past,” Rozett writes (Constructing a World, p. 144).

Some of the conventions used in new historical fiction are similar to those at work in detective novels: “The writers of Cold War thrillers and recent historical novelists attracted to Shakespeare’s England have this in common: they are fascinated by what [author Charles] Nicholls called ‘the secret world’ of espionage and counter-espionage, assassination plots, surveillance, entrapment, and interrogations” (Constructing a World, p. 72).

As for drama, it is difficult to beat the subject of Queen Elizabeth I, the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn and Queen of England from 1558 to 1603. As the subject of some 80 biographies, the Virgin Queen certainly holds her own in history. Rozett also cites her as a prime example of the way in which new historical fiction can be used to rewrite history and to fill in previously unexplained gaps.

By citing specific examples, Rozett notes that new historical fiction has examined everything from whether Queen Elizabeth really was a virgin to whether she had an illegitimate son Arthur by Robert Dudley. Were her relations with men influenced by a sexual trauma she is said to have experienced at age 14 by Thomas Seymour, the new husband of her stepmother Katherine Parr?

And yet, the attempt to imagine Elizabeth’s most private thoughts and actions is not just a speculative trait of new historical fiction. Rozett deftly points out that none other than John Foxe, author in 1563 of Actes and Monuments, “the best-selling work of Protestant propaganda in the 16th century,” portrayed Elizabeth as a religious martyr, using quotes and details that only Elizabeth herself would have known.

In addition to giving novelists the chance to imagine new plots and deceptions, and come up with intriguing amorous adventures, new historical fiction provides the opportunity to rewrite history in a woman-centered way. Historically, Elizabeth is sometimes seen as the queen whose reign continues due to the protection of a circle of astute and heroic males around her. In new historical fiction, Elizabeth is cast in the leading role in her own play, as the smart, savvy protagonist who stays in power because of her own acumen.

Finally, Rozett quotes Robin Maxwell, author of The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn, a woman-centered fictional biography: “Conjecture extrapolated from fact is, after all, the very heart of historical fiction.”

March 24 Fossieck Lecture Explores Jefferson-Hemings Relationship
By Greta Petry

Annette Gordon-Reed/Photo, courtesy of New York University.

Annette Gordon-Reed, associate professor at New York Law School and an expert on Thomas Jefferson and whether he had a sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, will be the guest speaker at the annual Janice D. and Theodore H. Fossieck Lecture on Monday, March 24, at 4 p.m. in Campus Center 375. The event, which is sponsored by the Department of History, is free and open to the public.

Gordon-Reed, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia). The book has caused quite a stir by challenging the traditional assumption by historians that Jefferson was a man of such character that he would not have engaged in sexual relations with his slave.

According to a June 29, 1997 New York Times review by Daryl Royster Alexander, Gordon-Reed “takes an innovative approach: she meticulously lines up the evidence of the affair with explanations from Jefferson family members and arguments from historians. Her conclusions make a credible case for Sally Hemings the mistress. Her scholarship also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for any future scholar to maintain simply that Jefferson lived on an intellectual plane, not a physical one.”

Gordon-Reed notes in her book that the names of Sally Hemings’ children, Beverley, Eston, and Harriet, are the same as names in the Jefferson-Randolph family tree. By 1830 all three had been listed as white by a census taker. “News published in 1998 described DNA tests showing a near-certain confirmation of a genetic link between Jefferson and Hemings’ youngest child, Eston,” notes Gordon-Reed’s biography on New York Law School’s Web site.

The Jefferson family, on the other hand, has maintained that Jefferson’s nephews were the fathers of the Hemings children.

At the very least, Gordon-Reed opens up a dichotomy between Jefferson’s written words, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and the possibility that he kept a slave mistress for 38 years. By shining a light on this one controversial case, Gordon-Reed draws attention to the sexual inequities and complex family relationships inherent in the system of slavery.

Theodore Fossieck, who established the lecture in 1986, served as principal of the campus’s laboratory Milne High School from 1948 to 1972. He set up the endowed lecture in memory of his wife Janice. He had a strongly developed interest in colonial history, as well as that of the American Revolution; the lecture brings to campus some of the most respected scholars in these fields.

Co-Director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project Speaker at King Luncheon
By Heidi Weber

Christopher Edley, Jr./Photo by Mark Schmidt.

Christopher Edley, Jr., a Harvard Law School professor and founding co-director of The Civil Rights Project, a multidisciplinary research and advocacy thinktank based at Harvard that focuses on cutting-edge racial justice issues, was the keynote speaker at UAlbany’s 24th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon on February 24 in the Campus Center Ballroom on the University’s Uptown Campus. The luncheon was part of UAlbany’s Black History Month celebrations.

Edley began his career in the Carter Administration as assistant director of the White House Domestic Staff. He joined the faculty of Harvard Law School in 1981 and later served in the Dukakis presidential campaign as national issues director. In 1992, he served as a senior adviser on economic policy for the Clinton-Gore Presidential Transition. He then served in the Clinton Administra-tion as a senior budget and policy official.

His book Not All Black & White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values grew from his work as special counsel to President Clinton and director of the White House Review of Affirmative Action. Edley was credited as architect of the President’s “Mend it, don’t end it” defense of affirmative action. He is currently completing a book assessing the Clinton Administration’s record on racial justice and analyzing the future prospects for the racial justice movement in a multiracial society.

Edley is serving a six-year term as a member of the bipartisan United States Civil Rights Commission. He is a member of the Task Force on the Future of the Common School, an effort focused on racial and economic segregation of public schools. He also serves on the executive committee of the board of People for the American Way.

For more information about Edley or The Civil Rights Project, visit www.civilrightsproject.harvard.edu.