Target

Analysts sort through huge amounts of often uncertain and conflicting information as they strive to answer intelligence questions. REASON will facilitate analysts’ work by pointing them to key pieces of evidence beyond what they have already considered and helping them determine which alternative explanation has the strongest support. It will do this automatically and on demand as the analyst works on a problem. The program will exploit recent advances in artificial intelligence not to do the analysis but to help analysts do it even better. As a result, policymakers all the way up to the President will receive analytic reports with the highest accuracy, clarity and timeliness. REASON will help intelligence analysts solve national security puzzles by identifying crucial overlooked pieces of information and showing ways they fit together. REASON aims to develop novel systems that automatically generate comments enabling intelligence analysts to substantially improve the evidence and reasoning in their analytic reports.

Deadline for 5 min lighting talk: Jan 6

Plan

REASON will help intelligence analysts solve national security puzzles by identifying crucial overlooked pieces of information and showing ways they fit together.

• Predicting terror events

  • how predictable (is it stochastic?)
  • Is it predictable?
  • What variables are important?

• Assess threat levels

  • reconstruct missing information
  • reconstruct partially observable world views

• Predict risk of future events

  • draw future event sequences
  • quantify unceratinty estimates in causal reports or narratives
  • identify evidencary support for narratives

Core Capabilities

• fractal net : time sequence of events
• gibbs net: spatial structure and evolution, including beliefs, variable alignment, under missing data
  • what beliefs do an individual actually hold?
  • will an individual take action A, B or C? what are teh probabilities?
  • Predicting organizational actions in terror groups or crime families or hate groups.

Job of Intelligence Analyst

• Collect, analyze and report intelligence that uncovers the intentions of foreign governments and non-state entities worldwide.
• Analyze a nation's ability to mobilize and sustain its armed forces, destroy strategic and tactical targets, employ denial and deception, and achieve specified wartime objectives.
• Examine economic factors that affect a nation's ability to support its armed forces, conduct military operations, and project power and influence.
• Develops creative solutions to answer analytic questions and solve difficult problems. Conducts research, develops query strategies, and analyzes foreign target intelligence to produce reports and recommendations.
• Uses geographic, regional, and/or cultural expertise to produce analytic summaries and reports for key decision-makers to safeguard personnel, information, facilities, systems operations, and plans.