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The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
October 2013 Volume 11, Issue 7
www.GIF-kmi.com
GEOINT Innovator
Letitia A. Long
DirectorNGA
Big Data O Visualization O Image Compression O IC ITESOF Global Network O Intelligence Analysis Training
Guide to GEOINT Technology
Special Report:
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Streamline your intelligence planning from beginning to end with unparalleled search functionality, exploitation capabilities, and product creation for the GEOINT community. Discover your data and reference materials with GXP Xplorer®. Search multiple data stores across the enterprise with a single query to locate imagery, terrain, text documents, and video. View data in any format in a Web browser with GXP WebView. Exploit data with SOCET GXP® to create geospatial intelligence products for planning, analysis, and publication using advanced feature extraction tools, annotations, and 3-D visualization. Deliver actionable intelligence when it counts with the GXP enterprise solution.
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DESCRIPTION 2013 GXP Enterprise Solution TRIM Full page / 8.375” x 10.875”
PUBLICATION Geospatial Intelligence Forum SAFETY .125” / 8.125” x 10.625”
DATE October 2013 FORMAT PDF/X1a
CONTACT Rachel Snyder, (858) 675-2850, [email protected] COLOR CMYK
ART DIRECTOR Justin Panlasigui, (858) 675-2935, [email protected]
Cover / Q&AFeatures
Letitia a. LongDirector
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
21
Departments Industry Interview2 editor’s PersPective18 industry raster35 resource center
rudi ernstFounder and Chief Executive OfficerPixia Corporation
October 2013Volume 11, Issue 7GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM
10 PLanning the soF gLobaL networkAn interview with Colonel Stuart W. Bradin, chief of the Global SOF Network Operational Planning Team, focused on giving SOCOM greater authorities, as well as establishing a new command structure with greater presence in the national capital region by creating a new training and education component command.
12showing to teLLWith the help of the latest visualization technology, that old creative-writing mandate—“show, don’t tell”—is becoming as vital for conveying and understanding intelligence information as it is for portraying the mysteries of literary character and motivation.By Peter BuxBaum
26training For inteL anaLysisResponding to the government’s demand for trained intelligence analysts, a number of companies are providing classroom, web-based, in-field and other forms of training, laying the groundwork for or supplementing intelligence analyst training offered by the agencies themselves.By William murray
33PLatForm For innovationThe intelligence community reached an important milestone this summer in development of a new information infrastructure, with the initial deployment of a communitywide software desktop, the opening of an applications “mall” and the launch of an IC computing cloud.By Harrison Donnelly
36
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4 big data FoundationsA whirl of activity has produced diverse technologies that are establishing the integrated foundations from which to manage GEOINT “big data.” But multi-source fusion and the automated filtering of big data for targeted analysis remain works in progress. By CHeryl GerBer
30comPression acceLerationAfter more than a decade of helping analysts work with and transmit geospatial imagery files, MrSID has gotten a makeover designed to speed performance and enable users to cope with the massive amounts of data being produced by aerial and satellite sensors.By Harrison Donnelly
16geoint techguideA survey of innovative technologies and solutions on display at this year’s GEOINT Symposium.
“In this rapidly evolving world, if
NGA were to continue to fulfill our mission of providing timely,
relevant and accurate
GEOINT, we knew we had to change—and change
dramatically. ”
—Letitia A. Long
Intelligence information sharing is again on the schedule for the GEOINT Symposium this year, and there is no doubt that the topic is near the top of everyone’s agenda these days. As Kshemendra Paul, program manager for the information sharing environment (PM ISE), noted recently, it’s been “a big year for information sharing,” as diverse events ranging from the Boston Marathon bombing to the release of secret NSA information “remind us of the importance of strengthening information sharing and safeguarding together.”
In his office’s annual report to Congress, Paul shows how information sharing—broken down into the categories of collective action, standards, shared services, safeguards, protection of privacy and civil rights, and the “culture of sharing”—is becoming a way of life in protecting the nation against terrorism and other threats. And it turns out that the geospatial intelligence field is among those leading the way, particularly in the area of shared services and interoperability.
The report highlights, for example, current efforts to encourage reuse of geospatial services, reduce their IT investment costs, and promote information sharing through development of a Geospatial Interoperability Reference Architecture (GIRA). The PM ISE is coordinating an effort with DHS, NGA, and the departments of the interior and commerce to publish GIRA during the first quarter of 2014.
GIRA is intended to provide guidance and direction to managers and systems architects from federal, state and local agencies and private-sector and international partners, to ensure the interoperability of geospatial services, fostering information sharing and ensuring fiscal responsibility.
The report, available at www.ise.gov, also highlights the Geospatial Intelligence Working Group (GWG), which serves as a Department of Defense, intelligence community, federal and civil community-based forum dedicated to advocating for IT standards and standardization activities related to GEOINT. The GWG places a heavy emphasis on collaboration between standards and enterprise architecture to promote re-use, interoperability, and open, “non-specific vendor” architectures.
The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
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A whirl of activity has produced diverse technologies that are establishing the inte-grated foundations from which to man-age GEOINT “big data.” But multi-source fusion and the automated filtering of big data for targeted analysis remain works in progress.
Most of the foundation-building is coalescing around integration and interoperability, linking structured with unstructured data in SQL and Hadoop or incorporating online enterprise GIS. There are also significant efforts under-way to automate and speed the processing of GEOINT sensor data.
Long accustomed to managing big data, companies such as BAE Systems, EMC, Esri, Exelis Visual Information Solutions, IBM, SAS and Teradata have been delivering solutions to realize the potential intelligence in unstructured big data from Hadoop and social media. Their aim is to improve the rate and method of source delivery or to integrate the analysis of social media with ISR collection.
Exelis VIS and IBM, for example, have worked with Riverside Research to develop the use of commercial big data analyt-ics with cloud-based exploitation services to boost the speed of processing huge amounts of ISR sensor data. Riverside, an independent, nonprofit research insti-tution, provides systems engineering, program management, modeling and sim-ulation to national security and intelli-gence programs.
BAE Systems, a provider of geospatial software solutions like SOCET GXP and big data solutions like activity-based intel-ligence, recently invested in the devel-opment of an Advanced Analytics Lab to enhance collection, processing, analysis and integration standards of open source data into intelligence products.
EMC expanded its existing big data infrastructure by acquiring Greenplum for cloud-based, data warehousing and self-service analytics. It also purchased Isilon Systems, for high-speed, scale-out net-work attached storage (NAS) designed for streaming video.
Esri has been fully engaged with big data integration in the past year, supply-ing GIS Tools for Hadoop, ArcGIS 10.2, a full release of the ArcGIS platform, and GeoEvents Processor for Server.
SAS rolled out Social Media Analytics as an on-demand software as a service (SaaS) product. The com-pany delivered high-perfor-mance analytics on the EMC Greenplum database appli-ance and in the Teradata Unified Data Architecture.
In addition, Teradata acquired Aster Data Systems for advanced analytics and management of big unstructured data, then integrated Aster and Hadoop technol-ogy under its Unified Data Architecture. The company produced SQL-H for stan-dard ANSI SQL support on Hadoop and expanded Hadoop support with its Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop.
Software InfraStructure
Derived from the Google MapReduce program, Hadoop is a highly scalable, fault-tolerant, Java-based, open source software infrastructure. It supports data-intensive distributed applications in large clusters of commodity hardware.
MapReduce filters and sorts big data, and distributes it in parallel processing while managing transfers and communica-tions between the parts. MapReduce takes
advantage of massively parallel processing (MPP), in which multiple processors work together on different parts of a program at once, with each processor containing its own operating system and memory.
When used with ArcGIS 10.2, Esri’s GIS Tools for Hadoop analyzes, visual-izes and stores enterprise geospatial data in Hadoop. ArcGIS 10.2 expands sup-port for Teradata and online GIS anal-ysis, among numerous other enhanced functionalities. GeoEvents Processor for
Server integrates real-time streaming data with ana-lyst-defined steps to filter out noise and redundancy.
“Integration is the key for big data,” noted Marwa Mabrouk, Esri product manager, cloud and big data. “GIS Tools for Hadoop have plugged GIS into the Hadoop environment. They have geo-enabled Hadoop.
“The libraries can give analysts bet-ter accessibility to more information by opening up all the unstructured and semi-structured data that is stored and trans-formed in Hadoop. Now analysts can query billions of records and keep large data in one location—in Hadoop. The tools will filter and aggregate the parts of the data that are relevant to an analysis,” Mabrouk said.
Semi-structured data does not com-ply with the formal structure of relational databases, but contains self-describing tags to enforce some hierarchy of records and fields within the data.
Teradata also believes integration is the top priority. “Managing big data is really about integrating data from mul-tiple sources into one central analytic environment to improve total visibility
By cheryl GerBer
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Marwa Mabrouk
InduStry delIverS SolutIonS to realIze the potentIal IntellIGence In unStructured BIG data from SenSorS and SocIal medIa.
www.GIF-kmi.com4 | GIF 1 1.7
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and connect all the dots across data types, departments and data marts in an organization. Our Teradata Unified Data Architecture was launched specifically for this purpose,” noted Bobby Caudill, Teradata program director, government industry.
“Our customers need solutions to har-ness all this data and exploit it,” said Peder Jungck, chief technologist, BAE Systems Intelligence & Security sector. “That’s why we are constantly adapting our products to accommodate new sensors. Whether it’s adding LiDAR analysis features to our geospatial software products, like SOCET GXP, or adapting our activity-based intel-ligence solutions to process and exploit data collected by ground, airborne, space based electro-optical, infrared and hyper- spectral sensors, our goal is to save ana-lysts time so they can work on solving crit-ical intelligence problems.”
The growth of mobile devices with GPS has contributed significantly to the volume of unstructured geospatial data. “There are unprecedented amounts of multi-struc-tured data with locations on them today. This is high-value volatile data that is only valuable for limited time—the data you might want to store in Hadoop,” noted Arlene Zaima, Teradata program manager, Integrated Global Analytics.
Esri’s ArcGIS Tools for Hadoop is an open source product available on GitHub, a web-based hosting service for software development projects. The tools extend the Hadoop platform with libraries and software utili-ties that connect ArcGIS to the Hadoop environment. Software utilities surpass application software capabil-ities by addressing the entire computing infrastructure, which is why the GIS tools can be considered an extension of Hadoop.
The tools allow ArcGIS users to export map data in Hadoop’s native format, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and intersect the map data with billions of records stored in Hadoop. The results can be saved to a Hadoop database or imported back to ArcGIS for higher-level geoprocess-ing and visualization.
ArcGIS Tools for Hadoop provides spa-tial querying inside Hadoop using Hive, Hadoop’s data summary, querying and analysis module. “The Tools for Hadoop
have a Hive extension that recognizes SQL spatial data types, Esri geometry and geometry operations,” Mabrouk said.
Hive allows SQL developers to write Hive Query Language statements that are similar to standard SQL statements.
Esri’s GeoEvents Processor for Server integrates multiple streams of data flow-ing continuously through filters with user-defined processing steps that can track the most operationally important events and locations with alerts of changes. The prod-uct offers connectors to common sensors like GPS.
proceSSInG Speed
The rate of processing the most numer-ically complex data from ISR sensors is slowing many analytical operations.
“Analysts often spend 60 to 70 per-cent of their time acquiring and fusing data rather than analyzing it,” said Jungck. “Tools like activity-based intelligence are automating data acquisition, while simul-taneously flagging suspicious data anom-alies that may warrant closer intelligence analysis. We need to give analysts tools so they can do just that, analyze.”
Exelis VIS, IBM and Riverside Research worked together on a solution to reduce the lag of processing time for hyperspec-tral imaging by using IBM Infosphere Streams to optimize software performance
and ENVI hyperspectral imaging analysis software from Exelis VIS. The sub-ject addressed a real-world mission shortfall in an oper-ational airborne hyperspec-tral imaging platform.
“The team’s goal was to take individual hyperspec-tral data cubes that were in proprietary sensor-derived format and convert them
into exploitation-ready NITF format,” said Michael Nelson, director, Intelligence Operations Directorate, Riverside Research.
The National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) standard is the default for the exchange, storage and transmis-sion of Department of Defense and intelli-gence community imagery. Hyperspectral images are captured in an area of the elec-tromagnetic spectrum that is invisible to the human eye. The images are highly pre-cise and can be captured remotely. The results appear as cubes.
“Using those processes wrapped in an Infosphere Streams environment, we consistently achieved one to two orders of magnitude improvement in speed of processing from the baseline,” Nelson said. “This will enable users to spend a sig-nificant amount of their time exploiting the data and processing results rather than spending time waiting for data to process.”
IBM Infosphere Streams provided the acceleration to the processes executed in the ENVI services engine. “Our end goal is to apply analytics to enable activity-based intelligence on automatically processed and exploited data sets using these tech-niques,” Nelson said.
“We can do the same with WAMI and LiDAR by using Streams-wrapping mech-anisms without going into the code base,” he added, referring to wide area motion imagery (WAMI) and light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors.
Nelson was pointing to the fact that the team’s technique avoids the need for time-consuming software design and development of specific algorithms for specific applications. The team’s tech-nique splits the processing across diverse commodity hardware.
metadata Standard
These and other gains aside, one obsta-cle blocking the more effective manage-ment of big data for GEOINT is the lack of a metadata standard.
“There is a true need for a multi-agency metadata tagging standard. It would solve the redundancy of data problem so every agency would not have its own copy of the data,” said Rich Campbell, chief technolo-gist for EMC Federal.
One of the most widely distributed metadata standards is the NITF Rational Polynomial Coefficient, used by commer-cial satellite vendors and supported by imagery exploitation tools as a sensor-agnostic mechanism for data exchange. However, the reach of big data surpasses this one standard.
As the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (ICITE) builds a common desktop and cloud computing infrastructure across the IC, the program also could provide a shared metadata standard that would reduce multi-agency data redundancy. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Michael Nelson
www.GIF-kmi.com6 | GIF 1 1.7
is producing the common desktop envi-ronment for ICITE, while the CIA and NSA provide the common secure cloud infrastructure.
“We’re encouraged by the progress on the ICITE program. We hope that includes an IC-wide metadata standard. This would further the application of advanced pro-cessing capabilities like big data analytics,” said Nelson.
The adoption of independent infra-structures, not dependent on file type, was accelerated, in part, by the introduc-tion of object-based cloud storage in EMC Atmos, a geo-distributed big data reposi-tory that can serve either as a hardware appliance or as software in a virtual envi-ronment. EMC owns a majority share of VMWare, a key player in the field of virtualization technology.
After acquiring the two companies last year, EMC integrated Greenplum’s database with Isilon’s scale-out NAS architecture. Greenplum’s hybrid database sits atop and writes data directly to native Hadoop, yet works with SQL data.
The technology takes full advantage of MPP with multi-level fault tolerance, and runs analytics against petabyte-scale datasets stored in and outside its data-base. Now called EMC Pivotal, Greenplum’s platform as a service integrates tech-nology from EMC and VMWare in the independent venture.
Isilon integrated HDFS natively into its OneFS operating system, thereby increas-ing the speed of using Hadoop data in Isilon data storage without the need for trans-lation. Isilon’s OneFS operating system is also integrated with EMC Atmos.
All data structures in OneFS main-tain their own information protection in an Isilon system called FlexProtect, which rebuilds the data in case of a failure and spreads individual file blocks across nodes. The nodes are connected via a high-per-formance, low-latency network based on InfiniBand, a communications link used in enterprise and high-performance comput-ing to deliver quality of service.
Isilon technology is the fastest NAS available today, according to a recent test. An Enterprise Strategy Group Lab audit of response time in performance for big data workloads showed the Isilon S200 scale-out storage set a world record of 1.6 million file operations per second.
“The overall response time is fewer than three milliseconds, which feels
instantaneous from an end-user perspec-tive,” noted Audie Hittle, chief technology officer, EMC Isilon federal market.
Isilon provides accelerated data move-ment over a wide array of standard proto-cols such as NFS, FTP and HTTP.
Standards for metadata imagery may just be the beginning.
“The industry is already discussing the need for other security-focused meta-data layers,” said BAE Systems’ Jungck. “These layers could track user changes and establish access control standards for enhanced security.”
Hadoop’s maker, Accumulo, is already working on a product called Apache, a robust, scalable, high-performance data storage and retrieval system that tags both source and user data, along with security information.
data InteGratIon
Teradata also delivered faster process-ing of integrated big data in its Unified Data Architecture (UDA). To expand its established position as a data warehouse and analytics provider, Teradata merged with Aster Data Systems to integrate unstructured big data and advanced ana-lytics. The result was UDA and the Teradata Enterprise Access for Hadoop.
“The better data is integrated, the more quickly questions can be formed and answered. Teradata UDA provides faster times from first query to intelligent response,” said Caudill.
Two components of the Teradata Enterprise Access for Hadoop are SQL-H and the Studio with Smart Loader for Hadoop. SQL-H provides ad hoc access to data stored in Hadoop through stan-dard ANSI SQL, letting users query the data where it lies. SQL-H can combine data from Hadoop with pro-duction data in the Teradata warehouse or run analytics on Teradata with only the data required for the query pulled from Hadoop. SQL-H supports the Hortonworks Data Platform.
The Studio with Smart Loader for Hadoop sup-ports the Hortonworks Data Platform and Cloudera Distribution with drag and drop interfaces, for a choice of two commercial distribu-tions of Hadoop.
SAS provides interactive GIS software within SAS that allows users to visualize and interact with data by selecting features and performing actions based on the selec-tions. The SAS GIS software uses spatial data containing the coordinates and iden-tifying information describing the map itself and attribute data to match, for instance, addresses and coordinates in the spatial data.
Under SAS OnDemand SaaS, Social Media Analytics, text analytics and data mining have opened big unstructured data to GEOINT analysts by applying link analy-sis to reveal relationships between entities, performing entity extraction and ontol-ogy management, including unknown and abnormal behavior patterns.
SAS Social Media analytics consumes social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube to uncover sentiment by filtering, categorizing and analyzing content. The product can follow specific topics of conversation or influential individuals who discuss them. Within these conversations, changes in sentiment over time can be compared to tactics or events to determine after-action effects.
medIa analytIcS
SAS provides advanced social media analytics with open source media for task-ing, collection, processing, exploitation and dissemination. The company teamed with AGI, a producer of commercial modeling and analysis software for the space, defense and intelligence communities, for the inte-gration of social media analytics with ISR analysis and visualization.
AGI’s application programming inter-face supports interoperability between SAS Social Media Analytics and ISR col-lection systems from satellite and airborne
intelligence. “We actively pull social
and news media information from more than 20 million websites in 30 languages,” said Marc Kriz, account exec-utive, SAS Federal National Security Group.
“In a use case scenario such as Somalia, a humani-tarian relief effort using SAS Text Analytics was able to
discover, within 30 native languages, con-versations or data around refugee camps that were no longer safe for displaced
Marc Kriz
www.GIF-kmi.com8 | GIF 1 1.7
villagers to migrate to because warring factions within the region were making it unsafe,” said Kriz.
In Yemen, social media analytics could discover the conversations around the reconstruction of hospitals and clinics in the area on local civil engineering web-sites, where engineers were blogging about a new hospital or clinic being built. “They are blogging in Arabic, so we run the analytics in the native language,” he said.
“SAS Enterprise Content Categorization (ECC) tech-nology puts documents in granular categories such as refugee camps or inter-national Red Cross or Red Crescent camps,” said Kriz. To manage big data, SAS technology creates filters on 5 million documents to whittle it down to 1 million, extracting only the relevant doc-uments using SAS ECC.
SAS leveraged its history provid-ing data cleansing and fraud detection
to the financial services and govern-ment sectors for infrastructure mainte-nance offerings, including data cleansing and management.
“We assess the data to detect anoma-lies, to evaluate if it has different formats and metadata tags, topographical errors or inconsistencies such as address changes, new job descriptions or different spell-
ings,” said Garcia. “It’s crit-ical that data be cleansed before it is prepared for the analyst.”
SAS DataFlux data man-agement technologies pro-vide data access across the enterprise; governance for a consistent set of policies and processes; data integra-tion and quality to assure the flow of accurate data
across an organization; and master data management for a single unified view of enterprise data.
SAS works with a partner network that includes EMC and Teradata for a
predictive risk analysis product called High Performance Analytics to achieve an MPP-based velocity boost in modeling and scoring procedures.
“We perform analytics within a database to maximize time to deci-sion and time to mission,” said Rebecca Garcia, sales director, SAS federal busi-ness unit. “We connect natively with various databases and perform analyt-ics in a grid or within a cloud based on commodity hardware.”
Meanwhile, it remains unclear just how big today’s big data will get to be. The next-generation framework for Hadoop data processing, introduced in Hadoop 2.0, will deliver Yet Another Resource Negotiator, a Hadoop project that will provide an even wider array of interaction patterns for data stored in Hadoop, including interactive, online and streaming applications. O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.
com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
Rebecca Garcia
www.GIF-kmi.com GIF 1 1.7 | 9
KMI: How does the OPT concept support the USSOCOM 2020 vision?
Col. Bradin: When Admiral William H. McRaven took command of USSOCOM in August 2011, he established operational planning teams to focus on his top four priorities: win the current fight; strengthen the global SOF network; preserve the force and fami-lies; and utilize responsive resourcing.
These teams are flat, fast and cross-functional; they report directly to the commander. I previously worked for Admiral McRaven on the stand-up of the NATO SOF Coordination Center [which later became the NATO SOF Headquarters], and he asked me to lead the Global SOF Network OPT at USSOCOM.
KMI: What is the mission of the Global SOF Network OPT?
Col. Bradin: In short, the OPT is charged with realizing Admiral McRaven’s vision of a globally networked force of SOF, interagency, allies and partners able to rapidly and persistently address regional contingencies and threats to stability.
KMI: Why is a Global SOF Network needed?
Col. Bradin: Admiral McRaven often likes to use the phrase, ‘There’s no such thing as a local problem.’ The reality is that one country’s internal security issues are often transnational or trans-regional in nature. We see this phenomenon borne out again and again through the growing interconnectedness of terrorist, narco-trafficking and piracy networks, to name a few. And in order to combat these threat networks, we need a network of allies and partners. To that end, the admiral also likes to use the phrase, ‘You can’t surge trust,’ the idea being that it’s very difficult to develop trust among partners when a crisis occurs. That way, when an opportunity arises or a crisis occurs, the relationships are already in place and we can operate exponentially better.
Instead, it’s much better to develop relationships with our part-ners before a crisis occurs.
The Global SOF Network has many components, to include: geographic combatant commands [GCCs], theater special opera-tions commands [TSOCs], special operations commands forward, SOF units, special operations liaison officers, interagency part-ners, special operations support teams to the interagency, partner nations, the International SOF Coordination Center at USSOCOM HQ, proposed regional SOF coordination centers, and forward logistics and communications nodes.
The OPT is working to strengthen the USSOCOM-owned ele-ments of the network—especially the TSOCs—while simultane-ously strengthening the ties among all the elements. USSOCOM
is the supporting command in all of this, and a major thrust of our work is increasing SOF’s forward presence and making it more persistent—thus enabling the enduring relationships we wish to build.
KMI: How are you going about creating the Global SOF Network?
Col. Bradin: Beginning in September 2011, USSOCOM began an assessment of how to best posture SOF for the future. This assessment resulted in the vision of the Global SOF Network as I described, and it identified the need to improve the special operations capabilities and capacity available to the GCCs through the TSOCs.
In the two years since, the OPT has begun implementing many of the initiatives of the admiral’s vision. We now find ourselves weeks away from submitting to the Joint Staff the Global SOF Campaign Plan, which consolidates all of the SOF requirements as identified and validated by the GCCs. It lays out the rationale and operational construct for the network.
The Global SOF Campaign Plan is a proactive plan completely different than anything in our history. It will nest all SOF activities under a single plan that is not reactive like contingency or oper-ational plans of the past. It operationalizes the Defense Strategic Guidance [which directs the joint force to focus on the prevention of war] and the Capstone Concept for Joint Operations [which calls for globally integrated operations].
Prevention will require persistent engagement with key part-ners. Our forces will be working directly with key partner nations to build their capabilities and capacity. To support SOF in this effort, everyone must think differently. We can’t just take things from our inventory and expect them to fit into the SOF activities associated with prevention.
SOF will shift the focus from counterterrorism operations to more indirect activities in the human domain.
SOF will be sharing with our partners, helping them grow to peer or near-peer status. SOF activities will mainly occur in sov-ereign nations that can’t politically afford to have large footprints of U.S. advisors.
Our support to our partners has to be smaller and more dis-creet but possess the ability to surge should that be required. Space-based ISR is an example of how we can retain a capability while maintaining a discreet U.S. presence.
All of the activity will be networked to ensure the threat net-works do not have the means to pass between self-imposed bound-aries. Everything has to get flatter and faster, and it has to be sharable. The majority of our key partner nations do not reside on U.S. national system. To support SOF in 2020, industry will have to think big, move fast and anticipate the future. O
The Global SOF Network Operational Planning Team (OPT) is focused on giving SOCOM greater authorities, as well as establish-ing a new command structure with greater presence in the national capital region by creating a new training and education compo-nent command. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Colonel Stuart W. Bradin, chief of the Global SOF Network OPT.
a converSatIon wIth colonel Stuart w. BradIn.
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With the help of the latest technology, that old creative-writ-ing mandate—“show, don’t tell”—is becoming as vital for con-veying and understanding intelligence information as it is for portraying the mysteries of literary character and motivation.
Because acquiring information through visual media is quicker and more efficient than doing so through the other senses, visualization tools are gaining increasing prominence in the geospatial and other intelligence fields.
Visualizations allow for the absorption of more data, easing the impact of the proverbial data deluge that is otherwise impos-sible to keep up with. The quicker acquisition and processing of more information leads to more timely and better decision making, which can make all the difference in many walks of life, but none more so than mis-sion-critical military activity.
“We acquire more information through vision than through all of the other senses combined,” according to author Colin Ware. “The 20 billion or so neurons of the brain devoted to analyzing visual information provide a pattern-finding mech-anism that is a fundamental component in much of our cognitive activity,” Ware wrote in his book, Information Visualization.
The human brain is designed to find meaningful patterns and structures in what is perceived through vision. The processing of information is guided by how it is presented, including attributes such as color, size, texture, density and movement that activate visual sensitivities.
Humans also respond to graphical stimuli by using short- and long-term memory to apply previous experiences on the process-ing of information, according to a report on visualization best practices released by TDWI Research.
As a result, the graphic visualization of data is becoming the expected norm for decision makers in the military and intel-ligence communities, as well as elsewhere in government and industry. Visualization affects how data is made available to users and the value they gain from it.
“Good data visualization is critical to making smarter decisions and improving productivity,” according to TDWI. “Poorly created visualizations, on the other hand, can mislead
users and make it more difficult for them to overcome the daily data onslaught.”
BIG-data challenGeS
Military and intelligence agencies increasingly use visualiza-tion in dealing with mission-critical issues.
“There are fascinating advancements taking place in GEOINT,” said Stacy Pfautz, the lead for interactive intelligent systems at Aptima. “Some of these, such as the ubiquity of sensors and the explosion of available data, are certainly increasing capabilities.
Yet, at the same time, those advancements are cre-ating additional challenges for analysts who need to work with, make sense of and find meaning in this deluge of big data.”
One of the responses to these challenges, which Pfautz dubs “intelligent visualization,” allows users to zoom in on a visualization with a touch or a spo-ken word.
“The other challenge is how to find the needle in the haystack within all this big data,” she added. “Specific behaviors or threats that need to be iden-tified in persistent video surveillance, or wide area
motion imagery, are often hidden from view in a vast canvas of everyday, irrelevant behaviors. It isn’t feasible to manually sort through terabytes of multi-INT data collected from unmanned platforms to find the behaviors of interest.”
Maps represent one form of visualization, providing “a tre-mendous opportunity to provide real intelligence and a rich geo-spatial capability,” said James Buckley, senior vice president and general manager for customer data and location intelligence at PB Software, a Pitney Bowes unit. “We are dealing with the opportu-nity to support more complex missions by pushing mapping solu-tions to the cloud which can provide visualizations to traditional geographic information systems and within organizations’ nor-mal IT infrastructure.”
The accuracy of images being displayed is also critical to the value of the visualization. This fact led the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to issue standards for the display of visualiza-tions on screen. According to the NGA standards, displays must be
vISualIzatIon toolS, whIch allow for the aBSorptIon of more data, are GaInInG IncreaSInG promInence In the GeoSpatIal and other IntellIGence fIeldS.
Stacy Pfautz
© 2013 PIXIA Corp. All rights reserved. PIXIA, HiPER LOOK, HiPER STARE, and HiPER WATCH are registered trademarks of PIXIA Corp. in the United States.
Realize the full potential of your data. Contact us to get started today.866-275-0882 | www.pixia.com | [email protected]
PIXIA® supports the United States military by deploying software solutions that enable the fast and efficient access of geospatial data, motion imagery and video. The innovative solutions provided by PIXIA increase the value of ISR data collected in complex areas of the world where intelligence assets are scarce and U.S. military footprints are small.
HiPER LOOK®, HiPER STARE® and HiPER WATCH® are Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions that offer speed, scalability, and interoperability within a cloud-based, service-oriented architecture. These high-performance, data access solutions assist with the task of generating knowledge when time is crucial and lives are on the line. We understand the demands of the mission today and innovate for the challenges of tomorrow.
High-performance data access solutions for large datasets
Generating knowledge Generating knowledge to support mission-critical objectives
For Geospatial Data & Imagery For Wide Area Motion Imagery For Full Motion Video Data
By peter BuxBaum
GIf correSpondent
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© 2013 PIXIA Corp. All rights reserved. PIXIA, HiPER LOOK, HiPER STARE, and HiPER WATCH are registered trademarks of PIXIA Corp. in the United States.
Realize the full potential of your data. Contact us to get started today.866-275-0882 | www.pixia.com | [email protected]
PIXIA® supports the United States military by deploying software solutions that enable the fast and efficient access of geospatial data, motion imagery and video. The innovative solutions provided by PIXIA increase the value of ISR data collected in complex areas of the world where intelligence assets are scarce and U.S. military footprints are small.
HiPER LOOK®, HiPER STARE® and HiPER WATCH® are Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solutions that offer speed, scalability, and interoperability within a cloud-based, service-oriented architecture. These high-performance, data access solutions assist with the task of generating knowledge when time is crucial and lives are on the line. We understand the demands of the mission today and innovate for the challenges of tomorrow.
High-performance data access solutions for large datasets
Generating knowledge Generating knowledge to support mission-critical objectives
For Geospatial Data & Imagery For Wide Area Motion Imagery For Full Motion Video Data
adjustable, so that black level, luminance and color temperature of the white point can be adjusted to the desired values.
“Geospatial imaging relies on accuracy of the readings, so imag-ing performance of displays used is crucial,” said Marc Leppla, chief technology officer of QUBYX, which has developed a software tool that allows users to calibrate the values specified in the NGA Display Performance Standard. “This saves time and costs for GEOINT pro-fessionals. For military and intelligence agencies accuracy of geospa-tial visualization and analysis is a matter of security.”
There are several aspects to the visualization of geospatial infor-mation, and different companies attack the issue from different angles. “Aptima is working on tools that help analysts better manip-ulate and visualize GEOINT data, and to sort through and find the meaningful behaviors or threats they’re looking for,” said Pfautz.
natural InteractIonS
Aptima’s Imagine software delivers a way for analysts to inter-act with imagery using a multimodal, naturalistic environment. “The Imagine software fuses voice, gestures, and touch commands within the context of the analyst’s workflow, improving their spatial awareness and search performance,” said Pfautz. “A conventional Windows environment, with a mouse and keyboard, requires users to continually shift amongst their tasks and reorient themselves, which disrupts their mental and visual momentum. Analysts can now interact in a more natural way.”
For example, Imagine users can employ familiar touch gestures to drag, resize and rotate images within the workspace. Then, point-ing to a location on the image and uttering a quick verbal command can open a new window zoomed-in to that area.
“This allows the analyst to focus on the task at hand with far less effort and disruption,” said Pfautz. “Imagine accommodates the user’s preference for touch or voice interaction. It also interprets and reasons about their inputs and tasks to enhance and personal-ize their experience and workflow.”
Aptima has also developed activity-based intelligence algo-rithms, which perform pattern recognition to automatically identify adversaries and threats. “This pattern-of-life analysis helps analysts zoom in on the most salient behaviors in human intelligence and image intelligence by separating the innocent from the dangerous,” said Pfautz.
“These algorithms for event detection and behavior recogni-tion identify signature activities in hundreds of thousands of track observations, such as a vehicle performing a U-turn among cars pro-ceeding straight,” she continued. “Analysts can then quickly extract actionable intelligence from streams of multi-INT data to help infer the type and location of adversarial behaviors, when threats are likely to occur, and by whom, based on the connections amongst persons of interest.”
Pitney Bowes is working on similar problems by allowing its solution, MapInfo Professional, version 12 of which was released ear-lier this year, to absorb information from a variety of sources so that connections between people, places and things can be automatically visualized on a map.
“Different kinds of organizations—business, government, mili-tary and intelligence—are all interested in analyzing the complex relationships between people and other people, including family members and colleagues, and people they contact by telephone and electronically,” said Buckley. “Relationships among people on social
media platforms can also be relevant from an intelligence stand-point. The places they frequent and the institutions they have rela-tionships with can also be important and can provide insights when they are visualized. We have applications that can visualize these kinds of relationships on maps. These visualizations can show the relationships of a person of interest to spatial points as well as to his network of other people.”
Pitney Bowes takes a big data approach, applying cloud comput-ing techniques to tackle these issues. “We use what we call a data hub to consume extremely large data sets, and we apply analytics to that to establish relationships among people, places and things,” said Buckley. “This is done at a scale difficult to achieve with tradi-tional relational databases.
“Cloud computing capabilities enable us to manage huge data sets,” Buckley continued. “Users can use these tools within their tra-ditional IT infrastructures. We want to be able to provide analysts not just the capability to perform a simple spatial query, but also to provide some of the analysis as well.”
Pitney Bowes earlier this year launched MapInfo Professional v12.0, which is designed to help organizations analyze trends geo-graphically and make critical decisions with greater clarity of poten-tial risk and opportunity.
“The primary goal of this release is to help our users easily and quickly create high-quality labeled mapping outputs,” said Buckley. “GIS professionals and location intelligence analysts will find that they can work smarter. In addition, the new MapInfo website has been built for users to find information easily on the MapInfo suite of products.”
MapInfo Professional v12.0 allows users to create maps more quickly. “It includes powerful new algorithms for labeling lines and regions, which means that users can create intelligently labeled maps faster and easier,” said Buckley. “Users now have greater control over how labels display, such as using abbreviations when labels are too long, automatic reduction of font sizes to fit labels within regions, selecting fallback options to generate rotated labels and curved labels, and the ability to drag curved labels to reposition them.”
MapInfo Professional also has the ability to read and write data to and from Microsoft SQL Server and PostGIS spatial data. PostGIS is open-source software that adds spatial capability to the open-source PostgreSQL database. “MapInfo Professional offers direct native access to PostGIS without the need for middleware,” said Buckley. “Support for PostGIS is also being added to our MapInfo EasyLoader tool.”
EasyLoader is a free tool for managing bulk uploads of MapInfo tables into database systems. “Data from these a number of differ-ent database systems can be accessed and visualized with the soft-ware,” said Buckley.
dISplay StandardS
According to NGA’s “Softcopy Exploitation Display Hardware Performance Standard,” displays must be “maintenance-adjustable to allow precise control of the black level, white level, and for color displays, the color temperature of the white point.” The document also points out that “since the monitor luminance may decline sig-nificantly over time, the maximum luminance by which a new monitor exceeds the required calibration luminance should be con-sidered to ensure calibration throughout its usable life.”
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Earlier this year, QUBYX announced launch of the new version of its geospatial display calibration software. PerfectEPD was devel-oped to adjust monitors to the requirements of NGA’s display perfor-mance standard, ensuring accurate image reproduction and correct readings in geospatial visualizations.
“The PerfectEPD display calibration tool fulfills these require-ments, calibrating color, luminance and black level of any display to the requirements of NGA display performance standard,” said Leppla. “Monitors calibrated with PerfectEPD provide more exact readings and retain their imaging quality much longer then noncal-ibrated monitors.” PerfectEPD Remote works like a remote control for the client software. “Not only can you adjust all levels remotely, but you can also start tasks, manage schedules, see results and even receive warnings if something goes wrong with a display,” said Leppla. “Whenever possible, on supportable displays, we match luminance response to the EPD in the look-up table of the monitor itself rather than the graphics card.”
PerfectEPD display calibration and verification software lets users see greater detail and get more exact readings. It also has a feature called “perfect contrast.”
“This helps to increase lifetime and maximum luminance on certain displays,” said Leppla. “Before there was the possibility of not being able to see certain shadows and gray and green tones. That is what is being enhanced by adhering to the with the NGA standards.”
For analysts, this means that it is easier for them to distin-guish different objects in an image as well as details with respect to
those objects. “The product also uses new algorithms to create what we call dominance response,” said Leppla. “How dominance and colors are displayed makes it easier for analysts to see details in an image.”
The monitor calibration software can be integrated with existing hardware systems, and is compatible with nearly any model of dis-plays, graphic cards and sensor devices. “Even less expensive com-mercial displays can be successfully calibrated with PerfectEPD, which allows saving costs on the hardware,” said Leppla. “In addi-tion to cost-efficiency, PerfectEPD offers excellent functionality with such features as history and reports, task scheduler, remote display management, and others.”
The future direction of geospatial visualization is toward the ability to ingest and visualize a wide variety of different kinds of data, including unstructured data from documents and social media sites. “We are already starting to do that,” said Buckley. “Another big trend is moving to mobile platforms so that users can access visualized data no matter what kind device they are using.
“Geospatial data is becoming just another data type that func-tions in everyday IT infrastructures,” Buckley added. “Visualization of geospatial data is emerging as a powerful tool that allows organi-zations to fulfill their missions.” O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at [email protected] or search our online archives
for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
Store. Discover. Disseminate.Learn how to increase end user productivity and efficiency by using ArchivalWare GS, an easy-to-use geospatial enterprise content management solution.
Visit PtFs Booth 401 at GEoiNt or PtFs.com to lEarN morE aBout archiValWarE Gs
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2d3 SensingBooth 436Danny [email protected]
2d3 Sensing is a nimble COTS technol-ogy provider specializing in the processing, exploitation, and dissemination of motion imagery and metadata. Using innovative vision science techniques and standards-based media management capabilities, 2d3 Sensing improves and extracts the information contained in motion imagery for better situational awareness and intel-ligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission results. 2d3 Sensing solutions are available as stand-alone software prod-ucts, SDKs and APIs.
American Military UniversityBooth 1532
American Military University (AMU) pro-vides quality higher education to the na-tion’s military, national security, and public safety communities. We offer respected, relevant, and affordable online programs which prepare students for service and leadership in a diverse and global society. AMU is the largest education provider to the armed forces, with more than 180 de-gree and certificate programs. Our faculty combines relevant theory with real-world experience. They come with degrees from top institutions around the world, and many are leaders in the fields of government, business, and non-profit organizations.
Learn more at PublicSafetyatAMU.com or stop by booth 1532 at the GEOINT Symposium.
Astrium Services, GEO-InformationBooth [email protected] www.astrium-geo.com
Astrium Services delivers an extensive portfolio of products and services ranging
from data acquisition and processing, data management and hosting all the way to so-phisticated geo-information solutions. Astri-um operates multi-resolution/multi-sensor satellite constellations with optical (SPOT, Pléiades) and radar sensors (TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X).
Our highlights at GEOINT: WorldDEM: New-class pole-to-pole DEM; SPOT 6/7: Rapid collection and coverage; TerraSAR-X Services: New Modes for higher resolu-tion and coverage; SpaceDataHighway: Next-generation data transmission service in near-real-time; and GATOR by i-cubed: Autonomous disconnected data streaming.
Join us for a complementary cup of cof-fee and learn more about our products and services at Astrium GEO Café #1249.
BAE SystemsBooth [email protected]/gxp
Get more done with fewer resources. The GXP suite of products offers an inte-grated solution that optimizes the analyst’s workflow. Discover your data and reference materials with a single search across multi-ple data stores using GXP Xplorer. Instantly view and stream data in any format with our newest product offering, GXP WebView, a lightweight, ELT module of GXP Xplorer, built specifically for the all-source and im-age analyst. Exploit data with SOCET GXP to create geospatial intelligence products using advanced feature extraction tools, annotations, and 3-D visualization. To learn more about the GXP enterprise solution, please visit us at GEOINT, booth 501.
Ball AerospaceBooth [email protected]
As world-class experts in geospatial in-telligence, Ball Aerospace & Technologies
Corp. has the agility to innovate and strength to deliver for the GEOINT com-munity. From persistent data collection hardware to advanced processing and exploitation capabilities, Ball provides in-novative, integrated solutions for our na-tion and world. We support critical missions for national agencies such as the Depart-ment of Defense, NASA, NOAA, and other U.S. government and commercial entities. Ball also develops and manufactures EO and RF solutions for tactical and scientific applications.
DigitalGlobeBooth 1119Chris Incardonachris.incardona@digitalglobe.com703-480-9593www.digitalglobe.com
This year at GEOINT 2013, DigitalGlobe will showcase a number of new and exist-ing capabilities that support critical mis-sions around the globe. Accessible and sharable geospatial information is essen-tial to our customers. With unrivaled quality and advanced geospatial analytic capabili-ties, DigitalGlobe provides warfighters and analysts with improved situational aware-ness that can help save lives, resources and time.
Please visit DigitalGlobe’s custom GEOINT website at digitalglobe.com/geoint to learn about our tech talks, watch videos about the U.S. government’s Global EGD program, participate in our new crowd-sourcing platform, or even take a virtual tour of our booth.
General DynamicsBooth 301www.gdnexus.com
General Dynamics will highlight its con-tinued dedication to placing the power of the GEOINT enterprise directly into users’ hands. With real-time collaboration any-time, from anywhere and on any device top of mind, General Dynamics engineered a
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Geospatial Intelligence Forum highlights key technology providers at GEOINT.
cloud-enabled, virtual environment that runs off existing infrastructures, providing remote access to critical data and applica-tions, while enhancing mission capabilities.
General Dynamics will also showcase the capabilities of GDNexus. An online community that enables technology leaders from across multiple industries to leverage existing products to create new, innovative solutions, GDNexus helps customers ad-vance their mission, reduce acquisition risk and keep pace with technology evolution. Please visit www.gdnexus.com for more information.
LizardTechBooth [email protected]
LizardTech offers software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial im-agery, and is the creator of the MrSID tech-nology, a powerful wavelet-based image encoder, viewer and file format. Exhibiting at the GEOINT 2013 Symposium in booth number 312, LizardTech will conduct de-fense-oriented demonstrations of the new-est version of its image compression and manipulations software, GeoExpress. In addition, LizardTech will showcase its Ex-press Server software for high-performance image delivery and publication, and its Li-DAR Compressor software, which turns gi-ant point cloud datasets into efficient MrSID files. For more information about Lizard-Tech’s geospatial software products, visit www.lizardtech.com.
Lockheed MartinBooth 309John [email protected]
Put the power of GEOINT in your hands! Lockheed Martin delivers capabilities and tools for actionable intelligence. We com-bine big data analytics with advanced geo-registration empowered by a cloud configuration. With Lockheed Martin, activ-ity-based intelligence is a present-day real-ity, not a future state.
From full motion video to activity-based intelligence, we are advancing big data, predictive analytics, forensic and situ-ational awareness technology to deliver in-novative solutions to critical missions. Visit Lockheed Martin in booth #309 at GEOINT 2013.
PixiaBooth 329Kenneth [email protected]
Pixia is the industry leader in high-per-formance, scalable data access solutions for large datasets. Its innovate technology and HiPER Look, HiPER Stare and HiPER Watch products focus on increased stor-age I/O, scalability and interoperability to empower data-as-a-service (DaaS) to be accessed anywhere within a cloud-based, services-oriented environment. Demonstra-tions will include HD-FMV, LiDAR, activity-based intelligence, and deployable discon-nected data access.
PTFSBooth 401Dan [email protected] x154www.ptfs.com
Visit PTFS’ Booth #401 to see the newest features of ArchivalWare GS, an easy-to-use enterprise content manage-ment solution that combines geospatial data management with a browser-based search interface. ArchivalWare GS is intui-tive, provides OGC/CSW/WCS and GIAS interfaces, and supports map/exploitation technologies including Google Earth/ESRI/RemoteView. It collects AOI data and man-ages repositories enterprisewide while combining full-text and geospatial search, significantly increasing productivity by re-ducing search time. Learn more about the software that many intelligence/DoD agen-cies are deploying: demos will be held Mon-day-Wednesday at 10:45/1:30/4:00 with mini-demos every 20 minutes.
RaytheonBooth 1401Kim [email protected]
As an industry leader in data collection, processing, discovery, visualization, and analysis for the DoD and intelligence com-munity, Raytheon is highlighting its latest analytic tools, tactical ISR solutions and forward-deployed situational awareness capabilities at this year’s GEOINT.
Raytheon is launching the Intersect fam-ily of analytic solutions at the show. These customizable tools refine data into insight,
providing our customers with the relevant answers they need to ensure mission success.
As part of the team supporting Army ISR through DCGS-A, Raytheon will demon-strate its latest modernization efforts to take link analysis to the tactical edge through DCGS-Lite.
Raytheon will also demonstrate its Army Air Soldier system a next generation wear-able computer and helmet mounted display ensuring forward-deployed rotary-wing air crews keep their situational awareness even outside the cockpit.
Riverside ResearchBooth 443Jim Bowerjbower@riversideresearch.org703-908-2104www.riversideresearch.org
Riverside Research, a not-for-profit so-lutions provider, is shaping the future of GEOINT through IR&D efforts that support rapid systems integration for global mis-sions, graduate-level education, and mobile apps. Building on over three decades of specialized instruction, Riverside Research, in partnership with the Air Force Institute of Technology, authored a first-of-its-kind text-book called The Phenomenology of Intelli-gence-Focused Remote Sensing. The com-pany also partnered with IBM and Exelis to leverage commercial big data analytics and cloud-based PED systems to greatly re-duce ISR data processing time. Visit booth #443 to learn how, and be sure to ask about Seamless Solutions for Mobile GEOINT.
TerraGoBooth 437John [email protected]
Visit booth 437 to experience TerraGo Vision, our powerful platform that helps customers discover the most relevant in-formation from any source and deliver ac-tionable location intelligence wherever it is needed for strategic decision making. In addition, see the latest TerraGo geospa-tial collaboration solutions that allow field personnel and decision makers on mobile devices to access, update and share place-based intelligence inside and outside their agencies. Booth visitors can also learn how TerraGo 3D Composer allows users to lev-erage LiDAR point clouds, digital elevation models and imagery to create dynamic, in-teractive 3D GeoPDF models for situational awareness.
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Mobile Mapping Software Speeds Data Collection
Seeking to connect desktop and mobile workflows in a seamless platform, Esri has released ArcPad 10.2. ArcPad is mobile mapping and field data collection software designed for GIS professionals. The new version of ArcPad improves synchronization with the ArcGIS platform and speeds data collection in the field with new automation options. Esri’s latest release of ArcPad gives users the ability to directly open ArcGIS feature services in ArcPad and synchronize edits with hosted or on-premises GIS. The new capability significantly improves
mobile workflows by enabling discon-nected editing of published services. In addition, ArcPad gives users the ability to automate edits with a Quick Fields option, which can be customized to autopopulate any field during data collection. For users who rely on desktop workflows that revolve around file sharing and distribution, ArcPad 10.2 includes new ArcGIS Online integra-tion. With this option, users can store their ArcPad projects and QuickProject templates as an ArcPad package in their ArcGIS Online accounts for sharing with members of their group.
Following the successful first coverage of the Earth’s entire land surface delivered in early 2012, Astrium’s WorldDEM data collection has now advanced another key step with the comple-tion of the second coverage. A slight adjustment to the acquisition angles of the satellites was used during the second coverage to eliminate any remaining height ambiguities in the first coverage data takes. While the first coverage already generated quality levels close to the final dataset specifications, with the second coverage now dual baseline processing techniques are applied to increase the homogeneity of the global coverage. The two twin satellites are now focusing their full attention on the Earth’s challenging terrain areas. They are taking a third and sometimes even fourth look at the high-altitude mountain ranges of the globe, like the Himalayas, Alps and Cordilleras in North and South America. The purpose of this additional data take is to ensure that details even in steep terrain, valleys, canyons or gorges are made visible that might otherwise be hidden due to shadow areas. The combined processing of these various data takes will ensure the glob-ally consistent high quality and level of accuracy for the final WorldDEM product.
Merger Creates Major Location-Based Data ProviderWatershed Sciences Inc. has entered into a definitive agreement to merge
with two of the leading providers of geospatial services and solutions—Aero-Metric and Photo Science—to form Quantum Spatial, which will become is the largest provider of location-based tools, analytics and data in North America. Quantum Spatial plans to invest significantly to enhance its solu-tions, as well as expand its newly launched family of GeoApps, a suite of cloud-based, enterprisewide operational solutions. Patrick Olson, the chief executive officer of AeroMetric, will be the new chief executive officer of Quantum Spatial. G. Michael Ritchie, president and chief executive officer of Photo Science, will serve as Quantum Spatial’s chief operating officer.
Crowdsourcing Application Simplifies Incident Reporting
Intergraph Mobile Alert is a new mobile application for crowdsourcing incident information that simplifies reporting for citizens. Cities benefit by enlisting the masses to help define and pinpoint issues, such as road or utility line damage. With crowdsourcing to collect data about city infra-structure growing in popularity, Intergraph’s Mobile Alert allows citizens with GPS-enabled smartphones to play an active role in their regions by immediately sending incident information to authorities. The launch of Mobile Alert supports Intergraph’s efforts to bring mobile solutions to the marketplace that function as an extension of the overall enterprise, with the ability to access geospatial data and asset and incident information in the field for real-time reviewing and updating.
Stephanie Deemer;[email protected]
Imaging Satellites Focus on World’s Highest Mountains
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INDUSTRY RASTER
PCI Geomatics, a developer of remote sensing and photogrammetric software and systems, and partner IAVO have released 3D FeatureXtract (3DFE). By calculating feature heights and outlines of overlapping satellite or aerial imagery, 3DFE can model 3-D features in a 2-D envi-ronment, and it does this without any need for specialized hardware. PCI Geomatics continues to provide leading-edge tools to correct satellite and aerial imagery, having recently released its GXL 2013 software, which includes innova-tive 2.5-D hybrid DSM-to-DTM editing tools. With 3DFE, customers perform true ortho processing, delineate building footprints, and create fully textured 3-D building models.
Kevin R. Jones Director;[email protected]
BAE Systems has introduced one of the smallest multispectral sensors available for unmanned systems, helping to improve soldier situational awareness by reducing the time required to identify targets. The company’s Digitally Fused Sensor System (DFSS) offers a combination of multiple capabilities in a single sensor so that users can intuitively assess a scene using an unmanned vehicle in time-critical situations. The DFSS system allows soldiers to see laser designator spots even in darkness, making it easier to coor-dinate and confirm target marking with unmanned aerial vehicles. The shading and high-definition imagery provide depth to the scene, and rapid target acquisition is enabled when the system cues the operator to potential problem areas. By blending low-light and infrared images in a single display, fighting forces get a broad range of imaging options, including full daylight, deep shadows, dawn and dusk, illuminated night operations and darkness. The unmanned aerial, ground or underwater vehicle provides the picture via a sensor mounted to the vehicle.
Eric Hansen;[email protected]
Air Force Seeks Development of Enterprise Collection Planner Riverside Research’s Modeling and
Application Development Laboratory (MAD Lab) has been awarded a subcontract by Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions to support the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System (AF DCGS) Program Office at Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, Ga., in developing the Enterprise Collection Planner (ECP). The ECP will enable DCGS collection planners to automatically or manually generate route and sensor plans based upon common collection parameters. It will also provide near real-time, 3-D visualizations of flown missions in a Visual Aircraft Mission Management Portal (VAMMP), a planning and analysis tool
designed by the MAD Lab under this subcon-tract. VAMMP will allow collection planners to clearly see how a sensor’s footprint is affected by aircraft routes, terrain features and other analytical components. Leveraging experi-ence with the previously developed Automated Collection Planning Tool, a satellite collec-tion planning suite used by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the inter-
active Aircraft Mission Planner, Riverside Research will collaborate with other Lockheed Martin team members in developing the ECP.
John Ploschnitznig;[email protected]
FMV System Adds Automatic Target-Detection
SoftwareGeneral Dynamics Advanced
Information Systems’ deployable, mobile and highly tactical system to capture and manage full motion video (FMV), TAC-MAAS, now features Sentient’s Kestrel Land Moving Target Indication and Kestrel Maritime automatic target detection soft-ware. This integrated offering allows mission operators and analysts to quickly transform raw data from unmanned systems into actionable intelligence and streamline the post-mission forensic analysis of video. Designed for in-theater operations where ease-of-use and low system overhead are vital, TAC-MAAS enables operators and analysts to capture and manage FMV by discovering, tagging and analyzing mission-critical events in real time. When combined with Kestrel’s ability to automatically detect a variety of targets in airborne electro-optical and infrared aerial live video streams, analysts will be able to detect small, slow-moving targets on land and water that might otherwise have been missed or gone undetected using traditional means.
Jessica Howe;[email protected]
Visual Intelligence has released a new geoimaging solution for the rapidly growing oblique and 3-D sensing market. The iOne n-Oblique is a multi-purpose, high performance sensor that allows collection companies of all sizes to take advantage of new revenue opportunities related to oblique and 3-D imagery. The iOne n-Oblique takes advantage of the iOne Sensor Tool Kit Architecture, a next-gener-ation software/hardware foundation for high-performing, multi-purpose 2-D/3-D geoimaging sensors for aerial, terrestrial and mobile applications.
Rich Miller;[email protected]
Multispectral Sensor Combines Capabilities in One Unit
Geoimaging Solution Serves Oblique,
3-D SensorsSoftware Creates Fully Textured 3-D Building
Models
www.GIF-kmi.com GIF 1 1.7 | 19
Compiled by Kmi media Group staff
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Letitia A. Long was appointed director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency on August 9, 2010.
Prior to her appointment, Long served as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from May 2006 until July 2010. Previously, she was the deputy undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Policy, Requirements, and Resources) from June 2003 until May 2006. She also served as the deputy director of Naval Intelligence from July 2000 to June 2003 and as the director of Central Intelligence’s Executive Director for Intelligence Community Affairs from January 1998 to June 2000, where she was responsible for communitywide policy formulation, resource planning, and pro-gram assessment and evaluation.
Long entered civilian federal service with the U.S. Navy in 1978 as a project engineer in training with the David Taylor Research Center. Upon completion of her degree in 1982, she continued with the David Taylor Research Center for six years, working on various submarine acoustic sensor programs. In 1988, Long joined the Office of the Director of Naval Intelligence, where she managed intelligence research and development programs.
Long was selected into the Senior Intelligence Executive Service in July 1994 and was dual-hatted as the director, Requirements, Plans, Policy and Programs Office for the Navy intelligence staff, as well as the director of Resource Management for the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). From 1994 to 1996, Long was on rota-tional assignment from ONI to the DIA as the director of military intelligence staff. In 1996, Long joined DIA as the deputy director for Information Systems and Services where she directed DIA’s world-wide information technology and communications programs. Long was also DIA’s first chief information officer.
Long earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering from the Catholic University of America. She is the recipient of the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service, the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Executive, the Navy Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Presidential Rank Award of Meritorious Executive (two awards), the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal (two awards) and the Defense Intelligence Agency Director’s Award (two awards). In 2011 Long received the Charlie Allen Award for Distinguished Intelligence Service from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, was decorated with the Medal of Merit by the King of Norway, and was appointed to the rank of Chevalier in the National Order of the Legion of Honor of France.
Q: You recently spoke at the annual meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and the need to attract “brilliant young minds.” Can you elaborate on that?
A: As you know, we live in a world of rapidly evolving and ever more complex threats. DNI Clapper calls them the most challenging range of threats the nation has ever faced. The threats of counterterror-ism, counterproliferation, counterintelligence and cyber require the community’s constant attention. At the same time, we must contin-ually evolve to stay a step ahead of those threats. To evolve more rap-idly than these threats, we must achieve the DNI’s highest priority of intelligence integration.
For this truly integrated community to emerge will require the fresh insights and multi-tasking skills of the next generation of analysts that we can attract to our agencies. NGA is undergoing a tremendous transformation. And we will only succeed in our trans-formation with the talent, intelligence, enthusiasm and diversity that today’s gifted young people will use to energize our bright tomorrow.
Q: The agency has a strong background, but you have been quick to point out that it’s not the same agency it was two decades ago. What is different?
A: NGA delivers world-class GEOINT that provides decisive advan-tage to warfighters, policymakers, intelligence professionals and first responders, and we are proud of our heritage.
Letitia A. LongDirector
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
www.GIF-kmi.com GIF 1 1.7 | 21
INT IntegratorProviding Access GEOINT Knowledge and Broadening Analytic Expertise
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In our history, the Defense Mapping Agency, which was estab-lished in 1972 in Bethesda and St. Louis, made maps and charts for the Army, Navy and Air Force for 30 years. The National Photographic Interpretation Center was the joint imagery analysis agency studying images from the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird and Corona satellites from the 1950s until the 1990s. In 1996, Congress united these two organiza-tions with six other components from across the community to form the National Imagery and Mapping Agency—NIMA. The purpose was to maximize the strengths and effectiveness of integrating the foun-dation data from mapping and the analytic precision from imagery.
Between 1996 and 2001, the groundwork for creating the GEOINT discipline was laid, often overcoming cultural misunder-standings, geographic separation and normal resistance to change. But the events of September 11th changed everything. And under the leadership of then-Director Clapper, NIMA was transformed into NGA with missions to fight two wars simultaneously as we continued to carry out our Title 10 safety of navigation and Title 50 national intel-ligence responsibilities.
Between 2002 and 2010, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, by every account from the combatant commanders and the troops on the ground, NGA provided superb GEOINT to the warfighter under the leadership of Directors Jim Clapper and Admiral Bob Murrett.
And we upheld every other mission, especially strategic intel-ligence over denied areas like North Korea and Iran, and disaster responses like Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti Earthquake.
By 2010, NGA had emerged from its defining decade and could rightly claim its place at the table as a vital contributor to the national security. NGA had arrived.
Q: Which brings us to today.
A: The gains made during that decade only showed us that we faced even more daunting threats along with fiscal challenges in the future. Starting in 2010, we studied the world situation, anticipated the current budget crisis, foresaw the rapidly evolving threats and opportunities social media has created, and anticipated the rebalance to the Pacific. We understood that with the explosion of the Internet, cellphones, video and the like, geospatial information would become ubiquitous—and a vital, if not the essential, source of intelligence.
In this rapidly evolving world, if NGA were to continue to fulfill our mission of providing timely, relevant, and accurate GEOINT, we knew we had to change—and change dramatically.
That fundamental change is stated in our Vision: “Putting the Power of GEOINT in the Hands of the User.” We are realizing that vision by achieving two goals: Provide online, on-demand access to our GEOINT knowledge; and broaden and deepen our analytic exper-tise to produce new value for our customers.
Q: This is part of NGA’s evolution?
A: Yes. We are not just a GEOINT data store where you go shop for the latest map, or an analysis cell where you work with a group of ana-lysts to solve a problem. We are both at the same time and so much more. Today, we are in the throes of building a new NGA around, though, and on top of the architecture of the old NGA while we keep the whole enterprise running smoothly.
Essentially, we’re building a stealth bomber around a fighter jet while we’re flying combat missions. We are building a seamless, dynamic Map of the World that will integrate all of our foundation
GEOINT and safety of navigation data, feature data, imagery, and intelligence analysis into one common frame of reference. This Map of the World will put GEOINT at the heart of—and shape the core of—the communitywide object-based production environment. This environment is a major new DNI core intelligence business process based on the simple idea of “one object—one time.”
Q: So, it’s all about integration?
A: Absolutely, integration is key. Using standard data structures and formats all data about any object of interest—any person, place or thing—can be easily shared with and accessed by anyone with the need to know. Imagine the fast, efficient work that SIGINT, HUMINT, GEOINT and MASINT analysts can do when they have in one place and one time all the most up-to-date information about the same subject! This will mean a revolutionary change in integra-tion and collaboration. NGA analysts have already begun to receive the benefits of the early stages of this integration with our expanded Integrated Working Group [IWG] concept combined with the new Integrated Analytic Environment, or the IAE as we refer to it.
Since 2011, we have set up and tested three IWGs—one for Iran to solve complex intelligence questions, one for disaster response to work in the unclassified environment, and one for Yemen-Horn of Africa to address gaps in foundation data and content. The IWGs broke down the stovepipes across the agency and brought together analysts, source collectors, application developers, security special-ists, imagery scientists, researchers, human resources reps, trainers and anyone who touched the topic into one space to gain synergies from that close constant contact.
We found that the real benefits came from those daily “ah-ha” moments of personal interaction, the shortcuts that saved days or weeks, the questions answered in minutes rather than days, or never. We are now figuring out how to scale these principles to an entire analytic enterprise.
The IAE drove two major changes—first, it dramatically short-ened the acquisition cycle for applications from years to months through a series of 60-day drops developed with the analysts. And it created an online presence where an analyst could put all of her apps, databases, products, news services, etc., to save enormous amounts of time searching for and arranging data.
Q: What is the expanded integration working group concept?
NGA is embracing change and encouraging innovation as part of its evolution. [Photo courtesy of the NGA]
www.GIF-kmi.com22 | GIF 1 1.7
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A: While the first steps for the Map of the World, the Integrated Working Groups and the IAE made excellent starts, they are only the beginning. NGA is changing more rapidly than any other intelligence agency.
We at NGA have done more in our short 17-year life as an agency, to embrace change and to encourage innovation. And the changes are just beginning. We are transforming NGA from a static producer of maps and imagery products into a dynamic provider of GEOINT content, analysis and services.
NGA is the catalyst for the integration of all of the intelligence disciplines for one simple reason. Everything, everyone, and every activity on earth has a time and a place—a spatial-temporal or geo-reference. This unique spatial-temporal reference anchors every-thing, everyone, and every action on the earth. It creates a unique framework for each object.
And all of the information we can gather about that object—sig-nals, HUMINT, human geography—can be tagged to that object. This geo-referenced one object one time acts as the foundation for integrated intelligence analysis across all the disciplines. As that foundation, GEOINT anchors all the INTs in the earth.
Q: So, data collection is important, but analysis is its equal partner?
A: That’s right, and we are the community leader in advanced ana-lytics that is deriving big value from big data through a variety of advanced methodologies.
For example, activity based intelligence enables our analysts to use multiple INTs to track activities and identify patterns that dis-cover essential unknowns, such as hidden facilities or targets that adversaries would rather keep secret.
NGA’s advanced analytic methodologies are moving toward a col-lective sense-making environment in which analysts participate in an iterative, collaborative process where they live within the data. Rather than focus on targets and points on the earth, they focus on observations, relationships, assessments and objects laden with data from many INTs. They work together in virtual and physical inte-grated working groups to discover unique insights that give decision makers more time and space to act faster and make wiser decisions. Given these rapid changes, NGA continues to serve the broadest national security mission as both a combat support agency and a national intelligence agency.
Q: Without a doubt, NGA is the premier provider of geospatial intelligence to the defense, intelligence and civilian communities. Whether U.S. military—from the combatant commander to the warfighter on the ground—policymakers who require unique insight and strategic intelligence, or mariners and pilots, they all depend on your foundation data and analysis. But what about international and partner support?
A: We work with international and coalition partners in military and humanitarian operations across the globe, for example the earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan; the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan; and coalition operations in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Q: You mentioned assistance to first responders of natural disasters is important for you as well. What has changed in the way you provide GEOINT?
A: In disaster response, we have made great strides in meeting our goal of online, on-demand access. Consider our support to FEMA for the Colorado floods. We deployed two analysts and launched our analysis and collaboration tools to support search and rescue efforts and provide flooding and damage assessments.
Our unclassified disaster event web page served as a hub for GEOINT. Responders could submit information requests, access products that illustrated damage areas, and share information. This tool was first used after Hurricane Sandy and now is a standard ele-ment of our disaster-response service. By streamlining processes and making products available on-demand, we can focus analyst time on the complex problems.
Our GeoQ system integrates imagery and analysis from all sources—including news reports and publicly available social media streams—for analysts to review simultaneously. This results in much faster assessments and helps focus and pri-oritize limited resources. And by tracking search-and-rescue operations via GPS logs, and graphically depicting completed searches, we helped prevent duplicate searches and overlooking damaged structures.
We have made tremendous progress, but we will continue to innovate to provide even better support.
Q: Everyone wants integration of the intelligence community but what are the steps to get there?
A: In our drive to lead the community toward integration, I believe we share three imperatives. This transition requires a highly skilled, diverse workforce that understands not only intelligence analysis, but especially intelligence integration. And they must have the skills and passion to make it our new reality.
First, in general, we need a diverse, agile workforce with crit-ical skillsets in big data analytics, visualization and advanced sensors. In particular, NGA needs world-class experts in geomat-ics, global GEOINT content, emerging technologies and advanced analytic techniques.
Second, our stakeholders need to encourage policymakers to support and resource intelligence integration. It is the DNI’s highest priority. It is the only way we can keep a step ahead of our adversar-ies in our complex future.
Third, there needs to be support for NGA’s vision of GEOINT as the catalyst for intelligence integration. The work of every intel-ligence discipline is anchored in GEOINT. Every signal emanates from someone or something, somewhere. Every cyber network has an infrastructure of real people, places and things. Every human source, every human activity happens somewhere, sometime.
Q: Any closing thoughts?
A: NGA is not only willing to lead—we are leading intelligence inte-gration. We have built our program and budget toward that end.
Together we must tackle these imperatives and accelerate the pace of change. We must bring a sense of urgency to our imperatives and take real actions now to make a real difference.
The demand for GEOINT knowledge, information and data con-tinues to grow, and it is our responsibility to meet this demand when and where it is needed. By realizing this vision, we will propel our nation ahead of our adversaries by ensuring that we can—see what they cannot, know what we should not, and act first. O
www.GIF-kmi.com24 | GIF 1 1.7
Working under pressing deadlines to understand a deluge of data, successful intelligence analysts need a daunting array of skills. They must be able to form multi-ple plausible hypotheses and judge all possi-ble hypotheses against all-source reporting, while mastering the use of the increasing flow of full motion video data as well as old fashioned human and signals intelligence.
Some may be born for the job, but for most, training is needed—not just in terms of technical issues or even the sub-stantive facts about the area or people being studied, but also to inculcate effective ways to approach problems and “think like an analyst.”
Responding to the government’s demand for such skilled individuals, a num-ber of companies are providing classroom, web-based, in-field and other forms of train-ing, laying the groundwork for or sup-plementing intelligence analyst training offered by the agencies themselves. These providers are working with government organizations as well as individuals who have security clearances or could be cleared, and are seeking an intelligence career.
A common phrase says that what ana-lysts need to be able to do is to “connect the dots,” finding links between seemingly dis-parate data. But many in the field, such as Karen T. Morr, training development and marketing executive at SAIC, find that con-ception far too limited.
“Throughout their careers, analysts are taught how to use analytic tools and methods appropriate for intelligence ques-tions and how to identify and mitigate the effects of assumptions, biases, infor-mation gaps, and denial and deception,” said Morr, a veteran of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
As this issue went to press, SAIC’s national security business was becoming part of a company named Leidos, following
the corporation’s separation into two inde-pendent, publicly traded companies.
According to Darin Powers, vice president for DynCorp International’s Intelligence Security Business Team, it is vital that intelligence analysts can gen-erate multiple hypotheses, and also test these theories against new data they come across. “Sometimes we rule out competing hypotheses prematurely,” he said.
It’s no different than in law enforcement work, when investigators sometimes rule out suspects prematurely, he observed. In some cases, intelligence analysts should be prepared to review more data before settling on a par-ticular thesis exclusively.
Training for intelligence analysts helps students understand the goal of pro-viding the best information possible given the time and data available. “Intelligence analysis bounds uncertainty and helps decision makers make the best decisions pos-sible on national security issues given the time and information available,” Morr said, adding that such work can be frustrating for those who more comfortable with yes-or-no answers and 100 percent confidence.
workforce ISSueS
Another issue is that, like much of the federal workforce, the current cadre of intelligence analysts is aging. As a result, people like Stephen Yantko, deputy director for plans and programs within the
Education Training Directorate at Riverside Research, have been focusing on how to reach the younger generation through working with higher education partners.
In response to this emerging workforce need, Riverside Research has partnered with
Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, his-torically black higher edu-cation institution, to teach a classified-level intelligence gathering course through its Engineering Department. Students are receiving secu-rity clearances through the program, which began a year ago, and these students could become future intel-ligence analysts. Riverside Research has also partnered with Northland Community and Technical College in Minnesota, which provides a three-credit full-motion video analysis course for students.
In the trenches provid-ing intelligence analysis training for more than 10 years during the post-9/11 era, Riverside Research offi-cials see their role as one to “train the trainer” in intelli-gence analysis, according to Yantko. “We’re not coming in to replace anyone. We’re looking at gaps in capability,” and helping to meet those needs, he said.
Indeed, the military already has extensive train-ing resources for analysts,
including Air Force programs at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, and the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.
By wIllIam murray, GIf correSpondent
Darin Powers
Karen T. Morr
Stephen Yantko
companIeS Supplement Government proGramS to develop people wIth the SkIllS to “thInk lIke an analySt.”
www.GIF-kmi.com26 | GIF 1 1.7
In addition, Riverside Research officials are deploying distance learning to provide graduate level education for the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, using video capture and capabilities from education technology provider Blackboard, according to Shawn A. Kalis, research director for the company’s Education Training Directorate.
Riverside Research is not limiting its horizons to the United States. “We’re trying to make training available to students in other countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, through blended learning,” which can include platforms such as Blackboard and traditional face-to-face classes, Kalis said.
A veteran of decades of Air Force training programs, Kalis acknowledges that the rising gener-ation of tech-savvy young people tends to approach the problem of connecting the dots differently than their elders. “I see them fact-checking on Google during class” using smartphones and laptops, he said, despite admonitions from their professors about the need to pay attention in class and to use credible sources for information.
“They’re inundated with information,” Kalis said of the students. “It’s a lot easier to connect the dots afterwards,” but not so easy under heavy pressure from military and civilian superiors demanding quick answers on tight deadlines.
analySt Boot camp
Another intelligence analyst training pro-vider, the Advanced Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC), provides a 10-week intel-ligence analyst boot camp for entry level analysts. The course’s $10,000 cost can be covered by veterans’ education benefits. ATIC also provides training for companies and organizations.
“There’s a steady steam of analysts who want to get a leg up over other analysts,” said Chris Quillen, ATIC’s senior vice president and director of operations, and this desire to be better motivates them to make the com-mitment to complete the program.
“We’re providing training across the globe,” he added, thanks in part to the U.S. government’s loosening up of require-ments for international intelligence analyst training providers.
In addition, ATIC provides 90- to 100-hour, three-week Air National Guard train-ing for the Global Hawk mission, for enlisted personnel from mechanics to analysts. “Our bread and butter is to provide customized training courses,” so that graduates are pre-pared to adroitly battle the perennial chal-lenges that can emerge, Quillen said.
ATIC is the first non-Department of Defense organization asked to join the
Defense Intelligence Training and Education Board. While that reflects the high regard that IC officials hold for ATIC, Quillen acknowledges the organization’s limits. “We’re not interested or capable of replacing agency training,” he said.
Another factor in the training equation is the cur-rent federal spending limits.
“Sequestration has impacted the govern-ment position,” Quillen said, since there is less discretionary funding for train-ing. “There’s a one-year moratorium for contract positions.”
ATIC claims an 80 percent placement rate for graduates of its 10-week analyst boot camp.
Wide area airborne analyst training is another growing need, and it is more com-plicated to master such media than still imagery, according to Quillen. Rather than have students focus only on information they learn in class, teachers want their stu-dents to isolate the key components within data, understand the “what” in each piece of evidence and draw their own conclusions using predictive analysis.
The company has seen its intelligence analyst training students go to work for the CIA, DIA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NSA and military services.
ATIC officials try to teach their students and graduates to use technology effectively in carrying out their work, according to Quillen. “You need to stay on top of it,” he said.
In addition to being able to use the soft-ware effectively to develop hypotheses and to test them, intelligence analysts need to effectively communicate their findings to decision makers. Writing such intelligence products is not something that all intelli-gence analysts do well, Quillen noted, so students practice it in intelligence analyst training courses.
DynCorp’s Powers pointed to a need for multi-lingual, cross-cultural training
among intelligence analysts. “We have a heavy bias as Americans,” he said.
Bias within a dominant culture can be hard to perceive, since it is subtle, unchal-lenged and pervasive. “The better we under-stand it, the better we can understand our adversary,” Powers said.
DynCorp provides intelligence ana-lyst training online, in the classroom and in the field. On average, about two-thirds of training is offered in a field classroom. Pre-training to prepare for the course is also available, which makes delivery of the course more cost effective, given that home station time is precious for many intelligence analysts.
BeSt practIceS
In the area of core analytic tradecraft, SAIC/Leidos teaches critical thinking, writ-ing and briefing, and best practices in community collaboration for intelligence analysts serving in the intelligence com-munity as well as in the military and law enforcement communities. “We also teach specialized analytic training in denial and deception, targeting, warning, social net-work and open source analysis,” Morr said.
The company helps “augment up-to-date subject matter expertise by providing courses and seminars in weapons of mass destruction, counterintelligence, terrorism, measurement and signature intelligence, human intelligence, geospatial intelligence, signals intelligence and formulating valu-able collection strategies,” Morr said. “For supervisors of analysts, we provide a forum to examine and reach a common under-standing of what is meant by a high-quality intelligence product for senior government leadership as well as a common vocabulary for applying quality standards in the review of intelligence products.”
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy, she continued. “Because of unique missions and customers, each IC member is in the best position to determine its particular training and education needs, delivery strategy, and the most appropriate organizational model to oversee its analytic training programs, including the role of contractors.”
Contractors serve as part-time and full-time resources to help government intel-ligence analysts, in some cases working on site, while others work on call. “These intelligence analysis training requirements change with the national security issues and threat environment, student throughput
Shawn A. Kalis
www.GIF-kmi.com28 | GIF 1 1.7
requirements, the experience levels of the analysts, and budget resources,” Morr said.
The company uses adult learning tools and techniques, and provides graphic art-ists, multi-media specialists, and gaming and simulations experts as part of an inte-grated training team, according to Morr. Such a creative approach may suit the needs of intelligence analysts better than a more traditional strategy, which takes less effort, she said.
“Training needs, both in terms of instructor expertise and delivery meth-ods, are continually evolving because of the changing threat environment, the availabil-ity of larger volumes of data, and the grow-ing demands of policymakers, warfighters, and homeland security and law enforcement officers for decision advantage in a complex world,” Morr noted.
Technology has a key role in provid-ing effective training for intelligence ana-lysts, she said. “Employing the latest and best practices in information technology can significantly scale and augment class-room training by leveraging web-based
training and interactive tools to reach ana-lysts around the world, keep their skill sets and knowledge current, and encourage col-laboration on difficult threat issues.
“Areas such as cyber-threats, for exam-ple, require close to real-time updates by experts on the latest techniques used by hos-tile actors, their plans and intentions, les-sons learned, and best practices that can best be delivered by leveraging the Internet and industry and academia best practices in contemporary adult education,” Morr said.
DoD is in the process of implementing various intelligence career field certifica-tions. “Generally, certification will involve satisfying a mix of training and experiential assignments, such as participating on task forces, short tours of duty to the combatant commands or rotational assignments in the intelligence community,” she explained.
But certification is no guarantee for suc-cessful on-the-job performance by an intel-ligence analyst. “Certification helps define competencies and career paths, but it can-not guarantee successful on-the-job perfor-mance in the high-paced and demanding
work environment of intelligence profession-als,” Morr said.
“Successful intelligence analysts are not only experts in their fields of study and well trained in analytic tradecraft stan-dards, but they also have a passion for substance, intellectual curiosity, rigor and discipline, tolerance for ambiguity, objec-tivity, judgment, integrity and courage,” she added, pointing to issues of character and virtues that may not be susceptible to classroom instruction.
So while training can help an intelli-gence analyst perfect his or her craft, the key to success is a long-term commitment to study and practice. One can’t take a crash course and become an expert. “Their exper-tise is acquired over time and in many ways, including significant personal investment in study and practice,” Morr said. O
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For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.
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After more than a decade of helping analysts work with and transmit geospa-tial imagery files, MrSID has gotten a makeover designed to speed performance and enable users to cope with the massive amounts of data being produced by aerial and satellite sensors.
MrSID—or multi-resolution seam-less image database for those more for-mally inclined—is a file format provided by LizardTech for encoding of ortho-photos and other georeferenced raster graphics. Its key capability is to com-press large data sets, such as aerial and
satellite imagery, down to a very small file size while still keeping the visual quality very high.
With support in all major GIS applications and no major direct competitor on the market, MrSID has become a de facto indus-try standard for compres-sion, and a key tool for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other organizations work-ing with still imagery.
“You can have images that might be hundreds of gigabytes in size, and com-
press them down to around 5 percent of the original file size, but the visual qual-ity is such that the human eye can’t tell the difference between the compressed and the source image,” explained Jon Skiffington, LizardTech’s director of product management. “We call that visually lossless compression.
tranSmIttInG huGe GeoSpatIal ImaGeS IS GettInG faSter, But SpeedInG vIdeo ImaGery remaInS a challenGe.
By harrISon donnelly
GIf edItor
Jon Skiffington
Compression Acceleration
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“That’s important because organiza-tions like NGA are the largest users of aer-ial and satellite imagery in the world. The amount of data they collect, with the fre-quency of revisit times and the increased resolution of sensors, is huge. The MrSID format has been very popular for that, by making the imagery not only easier to view and work with, but also to send downrange. We can talk about how much bandwidth there is and how cheap stor-age is, and that’s true to a certain extent, but we’re talking about warfighters who are deployed at the last tactical mile, where there are slow bandwidth connec-tions. So MrSID has been a very popu-lar format for those users, because the decrease in file size makes the imagery much easier to work with and to send,” Skiffington said.
GeoExpress is LizardTech’s application for creating and manipulating MrSid files. The company recently released GeoExpress 9, with improvements aimed at making processing up to four times faster.
“Over the past few years, we’ve been adding more and more functionality for things like image manipulation, and sup-port for more bands for users collect-ing hyperspectral data. We’ve done a lot of things to add functionality for work-ing with MrSID files. But one of the detriments of doing that is that the more processing you do to a file, the lon-ger it takes,” Skiffington said. “For a long time, people have been saying the software is great, but needs to be faster. That’s what we did with this release. Everything we did was focused on per-formance. In many cases, customers will see performance that is four times faster than previous versions.”
proceSSInG Speed
A key strategy behind GeoExpress 9 is to improve performance by taking advantage of hardware improvements, especially the widespread adoption of multi-core processing. In recent years, major manufacturers have placed two or more central processing units, or cores, on their chips, thus increasing processing speed.
“The idea is that you can get bet-ter performance without drawing more power and generating more heat,” Skiffington said. “In a lot of cases, you can think of a core as another processor.
For example, my laptop has one proces-sor, but it has four cores. That means it can do four things at the same time. We take advantage of that, so that if custom-ers have four processors and two cores apiece, they can now run eight jobs at one time with GeoExpress, compared with one in the past.”
That approach works not only for mul-tiple different jobs, he continued, but also for tackling a single big problem. “What if you have one really big job? We addressed by taking that one job, spreading it across four processors, and getting substantially improved performance. A job that might have taken an hour will now take 10 or 15 minutes, so it’s a big performance boost. The turnaround time from getting imag-ery to deploying it out is much faster than before. If they need to work on the imagery, for example by combining two data sets, they can do that faster than ever before.”
The new release also seeks to improve ease of use, for example by facilitating the use of automated functionality to crop portions of images for transmission. “We have a workflow that we called ‘optimiz-ing,’ which provides a fast way of cropping out the image that didn’t result in any image degradation or the need to fully reprocess the image. It took advantage of the MrSID format to rapidly perform the operation,” Skiffington said.
“The problem was that it was confus-ing,” he added. “Most people didn’t know when they could do this and when they couldn’t. They didn’t necessarily realize the option was there within GeoExpress.”
vIdeo ISSueS
Assessing MrSID’s role in the mar-ketplace, Skiffington observed that its only real “competitor” is JPEG 2000, an ISO compression standard that is sim-ilar to MrSID and is supported within GeoExpress.
“JPEG has really good compression for lossy data, so you can have high image fidelity even with small file sizes. It also offers lossless compression. But there are a lot more knobs, dials and switches com-pared with MrSID, which can give you good performance across different work-flows, and you don’t have to be an image expert,” he noted.
“Depending on the options you choose, JPEG 2000 can give you better
performance than MrSID, provided you know what workflows to use it for, and the right options to select,” Skiffington continued. “Will you be panning across the image or zooming in on one small section? Will I be sending it over the Internet, or dealing with it locally? You can make a lot of changes to how you encode that image, and it can give better or worse performance depending on what you choose.”
For the future, Skiffington sees plenty of room for growth in the use of compression technology, especially as resulting from the expansion of use of unmanned sensors and the booming popularity of video imagery. In the lat-ter case, however, there is still work to be done to achieve the full benefits of compression technology.
“There is still not a very good solution for how you work with video data, like there is with still imagery,” he acknowl-edged. “Photogrammetry and image anal-ysis from still imagery—how you use it and manage it—are well understood. Organizations have been doing that for a long time, but not many organizations have dealt with massive volumes of video data. How do you store it, retrieve it and find what you need in near real time? That’s a problem that is going to need to be solved.”
Actually, video compression is in widespread use for the consumer and other markets, for example by the video site YouTube. “For our purposes, how-ever, the question is how that translates into the geospatial field. There are a lot of issues with metadata that need to be fig-ured out. For example, you want to know the geoposition of the device acquiring the data. But how do you find the geo-spatial positioning of what the device is looking at?
“While you can analyze where that object is, there isn’t a streamlined way of doing that, and then being able later to search quickly. It’s a data management problem more than an image compres-sion problem. It’s something we’ve been looking at, but it’s still in the research stage for us,” Skiffington said. O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.
com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
www.GIF-kmi.com32 | GIF 1 1.7
The intelligence community reached an important milestone this summer in development of a new information infrastructure, with the initial deployment of a communitywide soft-ware desktop, the opening of an applications “mall” and the launch of an IC computing cloud.
The steps on the path to creation of the IC Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) were made public during a recent press briefing by Al Tarasiuk, the IC chief information officer, who is lead-ing the project.
Launched nearly two years ago, the IC ITE began as an effort to reduce IT costs by consolidating resources across the 17 members of the community. But it has since transformed into a much broader effort to increase information sharing, security and effectiveness.
As Tarasiuk explained, each separate aspect of the program is being overseen by specific intelligence agencies with particular capabilities in that area. The CIA and NSA, for example, have been among the leaders in developing cloud computing capacity, and so were selected to provide the IC cloud.
“The IC cloud is going to be privately hosted inside the IC, according to our security standards and security watch,” Tarasiuk said. “We are moving toward a single desktop for the community,
so over time we will evolve every agency to use the same software baseline, and in many cases consolidate that baseline to use cen-
tral services. Instead of every agency building their own software desktop, as they do today, we will have a common one for all, such as common collaboration services and email. The desktop is being produced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
“The other concept that we are implementing is an applications mall, with app stores in them. The idea is to begin to rationalize the number of applica-tions across the community. We can develop once and have it used by many. We are basing the initial archi-tecture for that on the Ozone Widget framework that
NSA has used and proliferated across the community. So NSA is the provider, or governor as we call it, providing the apps mall, where every agency can have its own store. But we may decide to move to a central store for all the community,” said Tarasiuk.
effectIveneSS and SecurIty
Although originally proposed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in 2011 largely as a way of saving agencies’ IT
By harrISon donnelly, GIf edItor
Al Tarasiuk
IntellIGence communIty’S It reStructurInG plan launcheS common deSktop, applIcatIonS mall and computInG cloud.
GIF 1 1.7 | 33 www.GIF-kmi.com
spending, the IC ITE program’s goals have expanded to encompass greater integration and information sharing, made possible by ongo-ing improvements in technology.
“Our goals are about effectiveness, security and efficiency,” Tarasiuk noted. “In the past, these were mutually exclusive, but not anymore, because we believe that the price points at which we can obtain technology, and some of the things that we have invested in within the community with regards to security of data and other issues, now allow us to move down a vector that addresses all three at the same time.”
Another factor aiding the progress of the initiative is that it is not a major new program acquisition, but rather an effort to lever-age investments already being made by the IC agencies. “Every agency invested in an IT architecture, heading on similar paths, such as cloud technology, thin clients, virtualization and focus on data rather than network protections. What we are doing in IC ITE is to harmonize those architectures, to establish over time a common architecture and platform for the community. So it’s not a gigan-tic program with a lot of milestones, with hard-set initial operat-ing capability and full operating capability dates. It really is a series of projects that the agencies are already executing, which we are re-vectoring slightly to achieve commonality across the community,” Tarasiuk said.
In addition, the key combat support agencies—NSA, DIA, NGA and National Reconnaissance Office—had been heading toward con-solidation of various pieces of the IT infrastructure already, Tarasiuk noted, and had done some work on developing a common desktop and consolidating networks.
But the most significant part of the effort, he suggested, is not so much in the technical architecture as in the business model used. While agencies today provide for themselves, the goal is to imple-ment a “service provider-based” model, where one or more of the big agencies are selected to become the providers of certain services to all.
Tarasiuk acknowledged that decisions remain to be made about how to pay for these services, either through centralized funding or by cost recovery from agencies. “We’re still deciding which will be which,” he said. “The ones where we need to manage user demand, such as cloud utilization, will be under a cost recovery model. Those that would be enabling services for the infrastructure, such as secu-rity, would be more the kind to be under central funding. But that’s still to be determined.”
The economies of scale provided by cloud computing will help with one of the key technical challenges facing the IC, which is to store, analyze and distribute the massive volumes of data generated by geospatial imagery and full motion video. But other steps will also help in that regard, he said: “We also have taken a look at how we move information once it’s collected, and bring it to where it needs to go for evaluation. We believe that there are opportunities for effi-ciencies, such as when there are multiple copies stored.”
manaGInG chanGe
Looking back on 18 months of “feverish” work on IC ITE so far, Tarasiuk emphasized the cultural shifts needed to bring change about.
“It’s interesting that, even when you’re trying to provide an enhanced service to users, there has to be a typical cycle of change. I’m not saying that there is resistance, but you would think that
people who appreciate more the fact that you’re giving them new and better capabilities.
“The most difficult piece of this is managing the change. Trying to move multiple agencies toward a single path requires the lead-ership to be involved, including the directors of the agencies, who are tracking big actions and making sure that work is being done,” he continued.
But the effort involved has to be balanced against the benefits of the new system, including the common IC software desktop. “The desktop will have a common email system and common collabora-tion tools. It will also give us better access to data over time as we grow the data in the cloud. So as the community starts going in, with more users on the desktop, those users will then have collabo-ration capabilities to other agencies,” Tarasiuk noted.
“The beauty of what we’re doing is enforcing an IC standard for all data objects that go into the cloud,” he continued. “Today, agen-cies comply with security standards, but they implement them in different ways. This is where we believe we can improve informa-tion sharing over time, because when data is structured the same way from a tagging perspective, we will then be able to implement the concept that we call ‘tagging data, tagging users.’ We have auto-mated systems that can determine if the user should have access to certain data. Today, if you sit in an agency and try to get information from a different agency, the data is locked down based on the way it was implemented.
“We’re trying to remove the technical roadblocks that keep that kind of sharing from moving the data. It’s not all going to be in one place, but it will be interconnected to the same styles and formats, so the automated engines can determine when a user can see the data or not,” Tarasiuk said.
In the coming year, officials plan to ensure the resilience of the current infrastructure instantiations, to make sure that they can move more production capabilities into it. Then they will scale up the number of desktops and the amount of data in the cloud, and bring in new services as well.
Although the CIO’s office is serving as overall systems integra-tor for the IC ITE, the project also includes substantial industry par-ticipation. Tarasiuk left this message for industry partners, which might also serve as guidance for all involved: “What I tell our indus-try partners is that they need to focus on the possibilities of innova-tion on this new platform. What does this new platform bring to the community besides a more efficient way of providing IT? It brings together data in a way that has not been possible in the past. We’ve done a lot with connecting data sets together, but nothing to this scale. This doesn’t mean that everyone has access to everything. All we are doing is removing technical barriers that potentially have caused us to duplicate data outside of firewalls, or maybe not get access because of the way it was locked in to legacy systems.
“We’re creating an environment where the mission elements of the community will be able to leverage in ways that they haven’t been able to do before,” he added. “I tell industry partners they may lose footprint from where they are today, because it’s inevitable that we are shrinking the amount of labor we will need to manage this infrastructure. The partners should worry more about how they can help mission take advantage of new capability.” O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at [email protected] or search our online archives
for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
www.GIF-kmi.com34 | GIF 1 1.7
October 21-23, 2013AUSA Annual MeetingWashington, D.C.www.ausa.org
October 27-30, 2013Imaging and Mapping for Disaster ManagementSan Antonio, Texaswww.asprs.org/conferences
October 29, 2013SAP NS2 Solutions SummitFalls Church, Va.www.sapns2.com
January 21-24, 2014Defence Geospatial IntelligenceLondon, U.K.www.wbresearch.com
February 10-12, 2014 2014 Federal GIS ConferenceWashington, D.C.www.esri.com/events/federal
March 23-28, 2014Geospatial Power in Our PocketsLouisville, Ky.www.asprs.org/conferences
May 5-9, 2014SPIE Defense Security & Sensing ExhibitionBaltimore, Md.www.spie.org/x6765.xml
May 19-22, 2014Space SymposiumColorado Springs, Colo.www.spacefoundation.org
October 5-8, 2014GEOINT Symposium 2014 San Antonio, Texashttp://geoint2013.com
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2d3 Sensing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9www.2d3sensing.comAmerican Military University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29www.publicsafetyatamu.com/gifAptima . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35www.aptima.comAstrium Geo-Information Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25www.astrium-geo.comBAE Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C2www.baesystems.com/gxpBall Aerospace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7www.ballaerospace.comDigitalGlobe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20http://geoint.digitalglobe.comDynCorp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31www.dyn-intl.comGeneral Dynamics Advanced Information Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C4www.gd-ais.com/cloudIHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3www.ihs.com/geospatialLizardTech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11www.lizardtech.com/tryitLockheed Martin IS&GS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27www.lockheedmartin.com/mission-on-demandPixia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13www.pixia.comPTFS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15www.ptfs.comRaytheon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5www.raytheon.comRiverside Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23www.riversideresearch.orgTerraGo Technologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C3www.terragotech.com/visionWorldwide Business Research Limited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1www.dgieurope.com
Compiled by Kmi media Group staffGIF RESOURCE CENTER
advErtisErs indEx
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Lt. Gen. Raymond P. PalumboDeputy Under Secretary of DefenseJoint and Coalition Warfighter Support (invited)
Bonus DistributionDGI 2014January 21-24, 2014London, U.K.
Cover and In-Depth Interview with
December 2013Volume 11, Issue 8
www.GIF-kmi.com GIF 1 1.7 | 35
Q: Tell us about yourself and why you formed Pixia?
A: I started my career at ABC Television and Walt Disney as a systems engineer focusing on multimedia data dissemina-tion and visualization. I worked alongside brilliant technologists who were build-ing solutions for multimedia content distribution and interactive media sys-tems. The last major project I worked on for ABC Television was the Millennium show, where we virtually flew between various major cities around the world using commercial satellite imagery from Ikonos a couple of months after the satel-lite became operational in 1999.
At that time, the technical solutions were very expensive and it took weeks to render the animations from one city to another. We figured it out and it became a defining accomplishment in the history of media entertainment.
I left ABC/Disney in early 2000 to start Pixia with my brother Patrick. Our goal was to figure out how to store mas-sive amounts of imagery and make it eas-ily accessible using common hardware platforms. Although our technology is ideal for several industries, we decided to move to Washington, D.C., after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—we’re from New York City—to focus solely on support-ing the DoD and intelligence community [IC]. We quickly discovered how the DoD and IC challenges of accessing massive amounts of geospatial data are almost identical to the multimedia challenges we overcame at ABC/Disney in the 1990s.
Q: You mentioned geospatial data access challenges; what are they?
A: In my opinion, the biggest challenge is [that] the infrastructure and back-end that manages data tends to be an afterthought.
It’s natural to focus on the end-user applications in the infrastructure since they ultimately drive actionable intelligence. The problem is that the
applications vary quickly, which causes the infrastructure and back-end to be almost the last thing considered.
In my opinion, apps will continue to come and go, but the back-end plumb-ing is the most critical enabler of all apps, which is where the government spends the most money. Building more high-bandwidth communications pipes will clearly help solve some of the chal-lenges, but actually getting more out of the existing infrastructure and being more efficient with what you have will be more beneficial.
Q: So how does government overcome data access challenges to better opera-tionalize intelligence?
A: Two ways. First, it’s critical to decou-ple the architecture to allow the IT requirements to be driven by the analysts and their screen resolutions, rather than the amount of data being collected by the sensors.
For example, if you needed more bandwidth coming into your home every time a satellite television provider adds more HD channels, that wouldn’t make sense. So why can’t we apply the same rationale to government’s management of geospatial data? The concept of stream-ing data on-demand based on a user’s exploitation or visualization tools is not the standard, but it should be. The cur-rent architecture is based on breaking up
large data into millions of files and then moving those files around the enterprise, which is slow, expensive and arduous to manage.
Second, government data access effi-ciencies can be improved dramatically by leveraging standard interfaces across the entire enterprise. The challenge is get-ting rid of the stovepipes. Cost and sched-ule are the main drivers for all program managers. Changing from old to new is never painless and usually comes with added costs and time. By mandating new standard open architecture interfaces at a senior level, and allowing additional time for that integration to occur, it is possible to achieve this goal. This should be the CIO’s responsibility, but they also need to be empowered appropriately. I believe CIOs should have enough power to actually mandate architecture and not merely recommend it.
So making data accessible and avail-able to anyone around the world is how you operationalize intelligence. Keeping data hostage in stovepiped repositories, continuing to buy proprietary collection systems with unique data management constructs and formats coupled with archaic methods of moving data, simply does not make sense. If data owners focus on the plumbing, use standard open interfaces based on users’ screen resolu-tions decoupled from the collection plat-form architectures, then the data will have increased operational utility.
Q: What does the future look like in your industry?
A: The future of data access and manage-ment particularly for geospatial data will be amazing. The new sensors are incred-ibly capable. Persistent surveillance will be a reality and the technologists are finding new ways to fuse the data they now have, which I believe will be a game changer for activity-based intelligence.
I look forward to being a part of the innovations that fuse the types of data no one thought possible. O
INDUSTRY INTERVIEW Geospatial Intelligence Forum
Rudi ErnstFounder and Chief Executive Officer
Pixia Corporation
www.GIF-kmi.com36 | GIF 1 1.7
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