LIGHTS is an emergent research initiative, shaped by the convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends – unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity – that is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global politics. This rapidly changing environment has information demands that surpass existing capabilities for information access, interpretation, and overall use, thus hindering our abilities to address emergent and complex global challenges, such as terrorism and other security threats. This reality has serious implications for two diverse domains of scholarship: international relations (IR) in political science and information technology (IT). Unless IT advances remain ‘one step ahead’ of emergent realities and complexities, strategies for better understanding and responding to critical global challenges will be severely impeded. For example, more so now than ever, the newly-created Office of Homeland Security rely on intelligence information from all over the world to develop strategic responses to security threats. However, relevant information is stored in various regions throughout the world and by diverse agencies in different media, formats, and contexts. Intelligent integration of information is fundamental to developing policies to anticipate and strengthen protection against terrorist threats or attacks in the United States.
The political science IR work draws on GSSD, the Internet-based experimental ‘platform’ for exploring forms of information generation, provision, and integration across multiple domains, regions, languages, and epistemologies which are relevant to complex but domain-specific applications. The IT component builds on work on the Context Interchange project (COIN) focused on the integration of a range of distributed heterogeneous information sources (e.g., financial, supply chain, disaster relief) using ontologies, databases, context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies. Both groups have considerable experience with the organization and management of large scale, international, distributed, and diverse research projects, including cross-national (e.g., China, Middle East, Europe) and institutional (private, public, national and international) agencies. Leading faculty are Professors Nazli Choucri and Professor Stuart Madnick (Sloan School). For the Project Paper see LIGHTS.
The work applies to any complex domain with multiple entities that rely on heterogeneous distributed data to address and resolve compelling problems. This initiative is supported by a network of international collaborators from (a) scientific and research institutions, (b) business and industry, and (c) national and international agencies. Related work in the domain of international political-economy include e-Readiness for What?