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Home > Resources > Case Histories
Two Case Histories are currently available for review:
HOMELAND SECURITY
Today there is an increasing need to identify, screen, analyze and investigate persons and events that may be a threat to public safety and security. Mountains of seemingly disparate, harmless items of data need to be correlated so that analysts can draw conclusions that might avert serious threats to the public.
The Problem
Analysts face a number of serious challenges that complicate their tasks:
- Overwhelming amounts of disparate data from disparate sources must be analyzed.
- Extracting meaningful information from data is tedious.
- Information content or certainty may change during analysis.
- An analyst’s hypothesis must be supported by cogent, explicit arguments.
- Analysts must show probable cause during the information access process.
- Human cognition has many deficiencies, including confirmation bias, poor handling of uncertainty, and insufficient consideration of prior probabilities.
- Different analysts may come to different conclusions from the same data.
In addition to these challenges, intelligence organizations are pressed to maximize productivity while controlling costs.
The Solution
ASI developed Analyst’s Associate to increase an analyst’s productivity while dramatically reducing the cost per case. In the process, this breakthrough Associate System solution ensures the certainty of analysis results and the believability of data.
Unlike search engines and other human-led systems that rely solely on the operator’s direction, the Analyst Associate provides a consistent, repeatable, efficient, and automated process to identify persons and events of interest and establish trends that may be a threat to national security. A less experienced analyst can produce the results of a seasoned “pro” because Analyst Associate contains the knowledge of the best experts in the field to raise the performance of all analysts who use it.
Key features of the Analyst’s Associate include:
- Retrieval and Event detection – The Associate retrieves and processes data to determine, if in fact, there are any relative significant changes in the present state of events.
- Activity Tracking – Integrating data changes with existing prospects, the Associate presents interesting circumstances as clearly as possible.
- Proactive Plan Generation – The Analyst’s Associate suggests and automatically develops and acts on plans that seek additional information about a person or event of interest.
- Alerting and Notification – The Associate implements those plans and alerts the end-user (analyst) of probable criminal activities.
The Results
1) 30x-50x Increase in Analyst Productivity
Based on a conservative set of assumptions, pairing an analyst with an ASI Associate System can immediately result in an 30x-50x increase in productivity.
The following table compares the current “human only” procedure used to screen persons of interest with the benefits of Analyst Associate technology. This comparison is based on a trained, competent screener processing an average of one case per hour and working 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year.
- 160 hours for the Associate System accounts for an average of 8 hours of downtime per week for computer maintenance - which is likely very high.
- During live tests in prototype environment, cases processed per hour have been as low as 5 and as high as 50. A “tuned” system for this application can be expected to exceed 20 cases per hour.
- Weeks per year assumes only 50 for the associate system because an operator is necessary to run cases.
- Based on live testing, expected value of cases processed per year is most likely to be between 100,000 and 200,000.
2) Huge Cost Savings and Dramatic Return on Investment (ROI)
The cost differential between human-led analysts and those working with Analyst’s Associate is staggering.
For example, if the INS wanted to perform a background check on every person who entered the country between 2001 and 2003, pairing INS analysts with ASI’s Analyst’s Associate solution would produce a net savings of more than $181 million over a three-year period. This total includes the cost for the hardware, software, and maintenance on the Analyst’s Associate system.
U. S. Dept. of Homeland Security “2003 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics” September, 2004
>> Read more about Analyst’s Associate / Intelligence Analysis
AUCTIONEER – BRINGING ORDER TO A CHAOTIC PLANNING PROBLEM
The Problem
The Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA needed to improve mission performance involving unmanned vehicles.
The Solution
ASI applied the power of c2it® in the AUCTIONEER project. The project explored decentralized control where a flight of eight UAVs self-organized to distribute tasks among themselves to effect mission improvements.
Free-market auctions were used to allocate tasks to the UAVs in the tactical environment. Distributed cost estimates were used to drive the assignment of tasks. ASI’s technology proved its worth – dramatically and unconditionally.
The Results
Through this project, ASI was able to confirm that the use of auctions is able to bring order to a chaotic planning problem. ASI’s Associate Systems improved mission measures of performance such as lethality of targets and survivability.
The AUCTIONEER project simulated eight unmanned air vehicles performing SEAD missions over a roughly 250 nautical mile area. The ratio of targets detected to air vehicles was 3:1. The rate of detection was approximately every 10 minutes with random spikes of simultaneous detections. Using least commitment planning, AUCTIONEER fielded a set of auction algorithms that were lightweight and made task assignments in approximately 3.5 seconds. The auction algorithms accounted for 0.5 seconds of the response time while the route planner accounted for three seconds of the response time.
>> Read more about AUCTIONEER
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