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Information Technologies

Shifting through Wikileaks

A team at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia has developed and patented a scanning system for locating and extracting information from the Wikileaks website. The technology, called DEX, can also be put to use for tasks in areas as diversified as fraud detection, biomedicine, education, social media and the Internet

STAFF | DECEMBER 29TH, 2010

From left to right: Pere Baleta and Josep Lluís Larriba, of
the DAMA-UPC group

The Data Management Group of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (DAMA-UPC) has designed a scanning system called DEX, which can complement Internet search engines and is designed especially for social media and the Internet, in addition to being applicable to the fields of biomedicine, fraud detection, teaching and advanced bibliographical searches.

The DAMA-UPC director Josep Lluís Larriba has proposed that this technology can be used to extract information from the Wikileaks website from two perspectives: one, to obtain generic indicators that provide information on whether the data network has the characteristics of a social network or if they create communities of data which suggests groups that could providing relevant information; and, secondly, to analyze how a specific issue evolves over time through the various documents hosted on the website and how they relate to a person, a group of people or different documents.

High-speed queries

DEX can explore and query large volumes of data in a network. The system offers high processing speeds, configurable data entry from multiple sources and the management of networks with billions of nodes and connections by a desktop PC.

DEX allows for queries based on simple values such as names and keywords, so that the user can quickly identify records that are related. Until now, this was possible in a limited way, but DEX can extract new information from the relationships and improves the speed and the ability to make complex queries in large information networks.

DEX improves the speed and the ability to make complex queriesNow, the DAMA-UPC group, which sees great potential for this technology in the field of social media and the Internet, intends to use the DEX system to analyze information on Wikileaks, the international watchdog organization that publishes enormous amounts of anonymously leaked documents on its website.

From fraud detection to the development of cancer

The Notary Certification Agency, in the first major application of DEX, used the new technology to detect fraud in the purchase or sale of real estate. Also, the Catalan Institute of Oncology is currently using it in the study of the evolution of cancer in Catalonia. And now, the DAMA-UPC group is looking at using DEX for pharmaceutical data analysis, in order to gauge the growth of the use of medicines.

Its inventors are also investigating how information spreads through the Internet: by which routes and at what speed, and how some news spreads better than others. The project is developed under the Social Media project, a strategic industrial research project funded by the National Strategic Consortia for Technical Research (CENIT).

In the field of digital learning, the DAMA-UPC team is developing a project, under the framework of the RecerCaixa aid program, aimed at recommending and exploring the audiovisual contents of primary and secondary educational materials.

Exploring scientific information

In addition to the fields of health, fraud detection, and on-line education, the technology designed by the DAMA-UPC group also provides benefits to the scientific world.

The group has devised a unique prototype for Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation, called BIBEX, to explore the world of scientific publications and relate specific literature published internationally. BIBEX offers other advantages to scientists: users can find reviewers for the evaluation of scientific publications and to recommend articles. In the future, BIBEX will offer the business world an instrument to find research groups which are working on areas of interest to entrepreneurs and investors.

Technology transfer

In order to give greater publicity and to market these technologies developed by the DAMA-UPC group, they have created the spin-off Sparsity Technologies , with the participation of the UPC.

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