Bringing together around 4000 attendees and 200 exhibiting organizations, USGIF hosted it’s GEOINTย Symposium 2017 for the global GEOINT Community to discuss opportunities and solve challenges. Leaders from across the government, military, academic and commercial sectors are meeting in this Symposium. The theme of this yearโs Symposium is โAdvancing Capabilities to Meet Emerging Threats.โ
โWe are standing where the SIGINT community stood when the internet became the digital fabric of the planet. And whether our new persistent view of the world comes from space, air, sea, or ground โ in five years, there may be a million times more than the amount of geospatial data that we have today. Yes, a million times more.โ These are the words describing the core thought of the keynote speech given by Robert Cardillo, Director, NGA.
Data deluge and the GEOINTelligent partnerships
The world has moved from data scarcity to data abundance, from hunting for one perfect image to creating coherence from a flood of images and the services that follow.ย He isย of the opinion that this data deluge is not something to be afraid of โ the data itself isnโt the threat. Managed smartly and efficiently, itโs the solution โ but itโs going to require change.ย However, he primarily laid focus on partnership and together operating as a community. โFirst and foremost, we know we cannot deal with the wave of data on our own. We need partnersโฆ If we think โcommunity first,โ weโre far more likely to achieve success for ourselves and our mission partners.โ
He elaborated on the partnerships, saying NGA would create a B corporation โ in effect a non-profit government company. NGA would hire someone from outside the agency to run it.
Cardillo said NGA is trying to make it โeasier to partnerโ and has created โNOME, which allows all our (government) partners to crowd-source and create foundation data in areas with no existing coverage. Right now, there are more than 600 web users from 15 contributing member nations on our World Wide Web presence and more than a thousand users on our top secret domain. Later this summer, weโll expand NOME to our secret domain; so many more military users can access it.โ
Automation is the key
With partnerships, developing innovative new tools and training is also imperative. โWhen we talk about the future and analytic modernization we often focus on discrete data and tools โ Activity Based Intelligence, Structured Observation Management, and Object-Based Production. But, itโs also about putting the right pieces in place to automate the workflow.โ
NGAโs goal is to automate 75 percent of an analystโs tasks, โso they have more time to analyze that last play and more accurately anticipate the next one. So they can look much harder at our toughest problems โ the 25% that require the most attention,โ Cardillo said.
Part of the closer cooperation with industry will involve a new Public-Private Partnership. Cardillo, in announcing the new effort, said โNGA would invest our data, our analysis and maybe even our data exhaust โ the by-products โ into promising startups, companies and ideasโฆ The goal would be to obtain a return on that data in the form of new or transformed data, new algorithms, trained machine vision approaches or an application of linked software.โ
But the biggest challenge NGA faces right now is coping with the gigantic quantity of data from full motion video. โWhere we truly need augmentation most right now is Full Motion Video. Because FMV, as currently practiced, is a critical challenge to NGA and our entire profession. Itโs time-consuming, manually intensive, redundantly exploited, poorly integrated and it leaves a great deal of useful data unexploited and undiscoveredโ explained Cardillo.
In other words, while it remains essential to national security, itโs both extremely costly and extremely inefficient.ย With an approach to seek a solution, Cardillo introduced a new position, Director of Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Augmentation. He announced Buzz Roberts as the new Director, whose first challenge will be to address FMV automation.
