UTOPIACOMPRESSION,CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: ABSTRACT: As military operations transition into urban environments, there is a shift in

Description

ABSTRACT: As military operations transition into urban environments, there is a shift in interest within the DOD to move from conventional to irregular warfare. To facilitate this shift, there is a growing demand to develop a broader and in-depth understanding of socio-cultural dynamics of groups, their intents and ensuing actions. Discourse contains vast amounts of information that could be used by military planners and automated decision support systems to gain greater awareness about a particular mission, the socio-cultural milieu where the mission is to be accomplished and in the final analysis the regional and world impact the mission may carve. To this end, UtopiaCompression (UC) is proposing to develop a hybrid discourse analysis system for hierarchical social group identification and intent prediction. UC"s solution (i) Takes the strengths of both statistical computational linguistic analysis and natural language processing for robust and accurate text parsing and analysis; (ii) models the intrinsic hierarchical social-culture group dynamics in a systematic and constructive way through utilizing a hierarchical graphical structure; (iii) provides probabilistic intent prediction/inference through a probabilistic causal belief network model and/or a meta-cognitive model. UC proposed system will greatly benefit military planners, decision makers, and intelligence personnel concerned with force protection and operations. BENEFIT: Through its collaboration with VRA and Raytheon (see letters of support included), UC and its collaborators (UC-E for short) are determined to demonstrate success with one of the military services as its initial Program Office and then expand its product offering to other service branches and agencies. Following Phase II development, UC-E will work closely with our esteemed Air Force program managers to identify military program offices to integrate the prototype technology into identified key intelligence and planning systems. DOD: The proposed technology will greatly benefit military planners, as well as other military and intelligence personnel concerned with force protection and urban operations, by improving the modeling of specified profiles or events based on combinations of real-world, intelligence indicators, such as real-time trends, social and environmental patterns, and historical events. This capability will significantly improve the ability to perform predictive analysis of complex relationships among large data pools. In this way, the proposed technology will facilitate the goal of predictive analysis in support of force protection to expand peace keeping missions and to identify threats and warn leaders of threat actions in time to defeat or mitigate them thereby resulting in overall enhancement of the effectiveness of the US military. Since 9/11, increasing attention has been placed on analysis of evolving scenes of interest to prevent further attacks and to facilitate operations in fields such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The proposed analytic modeling technology will be directly applicable to the Department of Defense Intelligence Production Program (DODIPP), the Army Counterintelligence Center (ACIC), the ACIC"s Counterintelligence Integrated Analysis Center (CIIAC), the Navy"s Modeling and Simulation (M & S) technology programs, as well as military planning offices. Commercial Applications: The commercial potential for the proposed technology is significant and slated to grow substantially. UC-E"s initial research indicates a broad and growing market within military and law enforcement sectors for additional levels of predictive capabilities currently not available from existent programs. Not only does the military have a current need for improved predictive analysis modeling technology, the technology proposed by UC-E can also be extended and refined to provide critical capabilities to business intelligence and market analysis professionals, as Business Intelligence (BI) is faced with many of the same goals and hurdles as military intelligence systems including disparate, immense and complex data sources which must be analyzed and presented in actionable forms. BI refers to applications and technologies that are used for gathering, providing access, or analyzing information about a company"s operations. Business Intelligence systems can help companies gain a more comprehensive knowledge of the factors affecting their business; for example, metrics on sales, production, and internal operations. UC-E believes that the proposed modeling technology is particularly relevant to this market segment and will offer beneficial advances over the currently available technologies. This market segment is also quite significant and growing. The worldwide appetite for BI platforms, analytic applications and performance management software in 2008 increased 21.7% on the previous year, from $7.2 billion to $8.8 billion. According to sector analysts, emerging technologies offering enhanced analysis tools (such as the proposed technology) may be disruptive to the current vendors and capture emerging BI users, as well as established customers. UC-E is highly optimistic about entering this market vertical.