Our Mission

The Internet is an integral part of global markets and information exchange. At any point in time the Internet is in fact the world's largest potential source of information. Much of the information, however, may be available for only a fleeting moment. This is particularly true for micro level behavioral data of interest to researchers in fields such as marketing, economics, consumer behavior, and cognitive psychology. Examples include individual auction bids, click stream activities, consumer search patterns, purchasing behavior, online messaging and real time group discussions.

The goal of CIDRIS is to make UConn the clear leader in massive real time data capture and analysis.

Data Collection

The Internet has spawned an enormous amount of online activities that permeate all aspects of life and society. Because of such pervasiveness, the Internet offers fertile data-rich environments that enable revolutionary academic research strategies and programs. Automated “data collection agents” can gather massive amounts of public domain data from the Internet allowing researchers to move from "data-constrained" research to "data-enabled" research. We can now actually address micro-level issues using massive micro-level data sets rather than approximate, aggregate level data. For example, it is possible to collect non-private but detailed public domain information about what consumers purchase, how they search for information, the degree of interest a news piece generates -- all in a very cost-effective and non-intrusive manner.

Data Security

Though the data gathered from open access sources on the internet is in the public domain, there is very little legal precedent regarding privacy issues in this area. Because of this and the very nature of the data collected by CIDRIS, privacy and data security is our top priority. Our servers, housed in the Gladstein Research Lab and the Financial Accelerator at the University of Connecticut are firewalled. Outside access is denied, except through our secure website. Each project we undertake is stored in a separate, password protected database to ensure separation of the data from each project.

Data Validation

Data collected over the internet must be verified. All data collected by CIDRIS is "cleaned" to ensure validity. We are continually developing and improving algorithms to ensure data integrity.

Data Analysis

While data collection is an important activity at CIDRIS, data analysis is what converts data into information. We use a variety of tools to analyze the data we collect. This includes statistical analysis, data mining and text mining to turn data into information.