Briefs

Jun 17, 2004. Oak Ridge National Laboratory .

Newswise � Thousands of special agents created at the Department of Energy�s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are on missions 24 hours a day as they work to uncover threats to national security.

These agents, which are actually intelligent software programs, scan the Internet, satellite images, hundreds of newspapers and electronic databases worldwide as they search for anything that even hints at a plot. In addition, the agents reproduce and spin off special-purpose agents that assist in the massive effort to scan more data than is humanly possible to analyze.

"The challenge is to take an incredible amount of information and very quickly determine what represents a true threat to our safety," said Thomas Potok, who leads a team of researchers in the lab's Computational Sciences & Engineering Division. "It's like having a stack of 100,000 pages and having to find the 20 pages that contain information critical to national security."

By using computers to gather data and reduce the information to what is relevant, the intelligence community can concentrate on analyzing just the meaningful information. Thus, people can make quick and accurate decisions based on hard data instead of relying on instincts or gut reactions.

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