SBIR-STTR Award

This effort proposes a solution for Intelligent Homeland Defense Software Agents (IHDSA) that will autonomously retrieve, filter, fuse, and make predictions using relevant Homeland Defense data. The suite of intelligent software processes will gather data from distributed heterogeneous networks, extract relationships between the data, display and forward the relevant product, and then execute predictive analysis to extrapolate the relationships among data and environments to formulate situation and threat assessments. Intelligent software retrieval processes (‘agents‘) will retrieve relevant data from heterogeneous sources and translate it into a common email-like format. The retrieval ‘agent‘ will subscribe or poll the external network of systems for relevant information, filter the results, and then apply further processing and routing to them. The software ‘agents‘ will incorporate necessary processes to access, retrieve, and deliver data from each network. The accumulated data may then be processed in a machine-to-machine (M2M) interface without having to await manual screening and association. Returned data will be displayed in an intuitive interface depicting the current operational environment and its associations with the incoming data. A software model for predictive analysis will explore the relationships between events, topics, individuals, locations and time to express a situation or threat assessment.

Benefits:
We anticipate the IHDSA will contribute a reduction in the time required to assemble and fuse data across separate networks through the use of an M2M architecture, improved ease of interpretation of data relevant to the current environment, and more timely assessments regarding the future environment. We anticipate the IHDSA will improve the quality of intelligence support provided to Homeland Defense agencies by the U.S. Army. We anticipate the IHDSA will improve the quality and effectiveness of anti-terrorist efforts and funding for any organization. We anticipate the IHDSA will increase the speed with which relevant, related information can be gathered, matched, and displayed for action. We anticipate the IHDSA will be used by agencies, organizations, or commands who find themselves overwhelmed with too much information and not enough time to extrude meaning from the immense amount of data they must evaluate.

Keywords:
Autonomous information retrieval, predictive data analysis, intelligent software agents, automated data analysis, software retrieval agents, autonomous threat assessment, anti-terrorist intelligence fusion, homeland defense software processes