By Piali De, Engineering Fellow, Raytheon Company
Remember ledgers? People with great penmanship wrote data into books of columns and rows, which were put on a shelf for retrieval when needed. After computer databases were introduced, information was at our fingertips, and the books stayed on the shelf. But the ledgers had something in common with databases: smart people who understood how to determine the most relevant information and use it to make decisions.
Remember ledgers? People with great penmanship wrote data into books of columns and rows, which were put on a shelf for retrieval when needed. After computer databases were introduced, information was at our fingertips, and the books stayed on the shelf. But the ledgers had something in common with databases: smart people who understood how to determine the most relevant information and use it to make decisions.
The amount of information available to us has mushroomed since the days of handwritten ledgers, and it continues to expand. Cisco Systems projects that Internet traffic will more than quadruple by 2014, producing data equivalent to 21 trillion MP3 files, or 399 quadrillion text messages. Add to that non-Internet data from multiple sources, and there are too many databases with too much information for even the smartest people to sift through.
Start Making Sense
Advancements in technology allow us to collect more data than ever before, and collaboration among multiple agencies involved in incident response is increasingly necessary. But what happens when there are huge repositories of data dispersed among many organizations?
On Christmas Day 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to use a concealed bomb to bring down a U.S. airliner. His plan was thwarted by fellow passengers, but the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Abdulmutallab should not been allowed on the plane in the first place, and it was a failure to connect the dots that enabled him to board.
Hurricane Katrina is cited as the largest natural disaster in U.S. history. More than 1,500 people were killed, and the storm caused more than $100 billion in damage. By most accounts, including that of a U.S. House of Representatives bipartisan committee, the tragedy was exacerbated by failures in mission management and emergency response.
The above incidents required many smart people to sift through detailed information to determine what was mission-related, organize and prioritize it into useful knowledge, and communicate that knowledge to decision-makers and first responders. But human nature often means that focusing on so many details can prevent us from seeing the high-level mission. When it comes to homeland security, that needs to change -- and it can.
Decision Support for Homeland Security
Just as we've utilized advanced technologies to collect information, we can turn to them to help us use that information to improve mission management. At Raytheon, we illustrate these technologies as three layers that collect information, integrate it, and turn it into knowledge on which mission decisions can be based.
- Sensors, such as video cameras, translate inputs from the physical world into the digital domain.
- The second layer -- data fusion -- brings these and other information sources, such as Web pages, into a common place. Raytheon's Athena Multi-Domain Awareness System is an example of this type of technology.
- The third layer consists of decision-support technology that uses a mission model to sift through data, extract the most important information, and alert decision makers when a situation requires action. Exemplified by Raytheon's Confluence", this is the next layer of smart.
Decision support technologies like Confluence understand the big picture, as well as individual missions and how they interact with other missions. Confluence uses that knowledge to sift through, process and make sense of the detailed data and provide decision makers and responders with customized support around
- the current state of the mission, obstacles, and projected additional steps to achieve mission goals;
- activities of all organizations participating in the mission;
- resources and assets; and
- tasks to consider to better achieve mission objectives.
From preventing terrorist attacks to organizing massive mobilizations around natural disasters, today's intelligence environment is progressively becoming more complex. We are faced with overwhelming amounts of data, and it's critical for government departments and agencies at the federal, state and local levels to collaborate and communicate to achieve mission goals. That's why it's essential that we adopt decision support technologies -- to free people from sifting through mountains of detail, so that they can focus on their homeland security missions. That's why we need the next layer of smart.
Confluence is a trademark of Raytheon Company.
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