DDMA works on three key problems in data analysis:

• From Data to Knowledge: Increasingly, progress in speed, resolution and the quality of the analysis comes not from the capabilities of the hardware, but from the sophistication and useability of our algorithms and their ability to extract the information we care about. Our work in this area includes inverse problems, streaming data, measures and metrics, and image processing.
• Optimization: Data analysis poses challenging optimization problems: high-dimensionality, complex variable constraints, computationally expensive objectives, incomplete or missing derivative information, and categorical or noncontinuous variables.
• Analysis Environments: DDMA's approach to data analysis integrates mathematics and computer science. DDMA's work on the computing environments for data analysis includes parallel language research, problem solving environments, performance analysis, numerical methods.