Venture guru Walker touts 'informatics'

BYLINE: Robert J. Terry

The first of a planned three conferences on informatics hosted by venture capitalist Steve Walker was held Tuesday, an organized effort among government and university laboratories and Maryland's technology industry to highlight research and economic development opportunities in data mining and information assurance.

The Informatics Coalition, a volunteer group of technology leaders throughout the state, has been nurtured by Walker for the better part of a year, and Tuesday's "InformaticsMARYLAND 2006" conference, attended by 250, was the culmination of those efforts.

Walker, the noted high-tech entrepreneur and investor, has long wanted to highlight the region's strengths in informatics -- simply put, the collection, organization and sophisticated analysis of data -- and cultivate links between the many public- and private-sector players doing work in this arena.

A slate of panel discussions was scheduled to give insight on industry needs, share new research taking place, and talk about technology licensing opportunities.

The first conference is designed to shed light on the direction and potential of Maryland's informatics industry, Walker said. Subsequent conferences will take a closer look at bioinformatics and what experts in the field call "knowledge discovery."

"Our goal is just to let people know just how much is going on in this region," Walker said in an interview. "If we could just begin to introduce people to each other, a whole lot more will happen."

Leaders at the National Security Agency -- a key economic driver in Greater Baltimore -- have publicly discussed the crush of data being collected and analyzed at the super-secretive Anne Arundel County spy agency.

Walker said he was inspired to pursue the idea of an Informatics Coalition in part after hearing talks given by Eric Haseltine, NSA's former director of research. In a 2004 speech to Anne Arundel Tech Council members, Haseltine said the agency was in danger of drowning under the wave of information it sends and intercepts from phone calls, e-mails and instant messages it monitors around the world.

And the bigger challenge was connecting the dots, sifting through massive volumes of information that will lead to chatter about, for example, a future terrorist strike.

In short, Haseltine said, it was a "volume, velocity and variety problem," a "big wave coming at us, but it's coming faster and faster all the time." Young, innovative companies held answers to this problem, he added.