Modern information technologies are transforming the way we think in a manner similar to, but much faster than, the invention of the printing press and the formation of large library collections did 500 years ago. We are just at the beginning of this revolution; what we do now could have lasting and profound effects on the future of our species. The research of Dr. Michael Kurtz, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is centered on inventing and implementing methods to facilitate the efficient interaction of human scientists with our rapidly growing collective knowledge, particularly in the domains of astronomy and physics. As the developer of one of the first scientific search engines to ever be developed, the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) [http://adsabs.harvard.edu], and as an observational cosmologist, Dr. Kurtz has a remarkable history for innovative and relevant research. Dr. Kurtz continues to develop the ADS, which has become the largest digital library portal for astronomers and physicists in existence and is used each day by researchers all over the world. For three decades, he has been looking into ways to understand the huge corpus of digital text we possess, with an increase in funding, Dr. Kurtz hopes to more quickly and effectively design helpful tools for researchers.

Due to the connection with ADS, Dr. Kurtz's research has the ability to directly influence the daily research behavior of more than 50,000 scientists and will effect a few hundred thousand other researchers. In addition to his individual research, Dr. Kurtz is also committed to the dissemination of other important ideas. As the moderator for the Astrophysical Instruments and Methods section of arXiv, Dr. Kurtz evaluates all the technology preprints that go to press within Astrophysics. Dr. Kurtz  views "knowledge as a collaborative exercise," where knowledge continues to build upon itself due to the interaction between people. Having entered a new era of faster computers with more memory, he remarks, "we are in a new timescale domain and have to figure out what we are going to do with the enormous amount of information." As the only person to hold the dual distinction of Fellow of the American Physical Society in the Astrophysics Section and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Computer, Communication, and Information Science Division and as the van Biesbroeck Prize and ISI Citation Research Award winner, Dr. Kurtz is highly qualified to continue to advance towards organizing the incredible amount of information in an accessible way for researchers.

• Improving ADS: Dr. Kurtz will merge the results of automated text analysis and text mining algorithms with human annotation. He hopes that by doing so, he and his team will be able to capture the information from both sources to make the literature available more accessible.

• Search Engine Technologies: Dr. Kurtz is further developing the search engine technologies within ADS by using mathematical properties to create a multidimensional space where all the dimensions represent concepts. Therefore, his work hopes to inform search and discovery strategies.

• Accessing Vast Amount of Information: With the amount of literature increasing by 3-4% each year, it has become impossible for one to read everything they would need to about a subject. Therefore, Dr. Kurtz and his team are working to figure out ways to better organize data in order for researchers to have the most efficient access possible.