CIDRIS – the Center for Internet Data and Research Intelligence Services, was developed to establish the University of Connecticut as the leader in innovative real time Internet data collection, validation and analysis. CIDRIS draws upon significant current expertise in this arena of several core founding team members. Consistent with the multi-disciplinary potential use of Internet data, the CIDRIS team includes members from Operations and Information Management, Marketing, Computer Science, Statistics and Communication Science.

CIDRIS was one of four winners of the 2004 Provost's Grant Competition. The start-up funding from the grant competition is being used to build upon the foothold established by the groundbreaking research of the CIDRIS team members.

CIDRIS is structured as a unique multidisciplinary research hub that provides services in: (1) establishing means for intelligent collection of massive amounts of non-private data from the Internet; (2) ensuring reliability, cleanliness and validity to the collected data; (3) performing intelligent analytics and advanced data mining; and (4) structuring quasi-experimental tools to support in-depth research field studies. These services are provided to multiple units at the University of Connecticut as well as to external constituents. We note that the data involved is public domain data. As with all of our projects completed to date, great care is taken to insure that all privacy laws are carefully adhered to and all research rules and regulations vigilantly followed.