Briefs

Joab Jackson -- GCN -- Jan 24, 2005.

Current apps cannot filter data quickly, finely enough, agency�s research chief says

Every bit counts�literally�at the National Security Agency.

That�s why NSA needs new informatics software that can gather individual bits of information from many sources and assemble them to produce �actionable knowledge,� said Eric Haseltine, NSA research director.

Today�s commercial intelligence software just isn�t powerful enough to do the job of sorting through the immense amount of data NSA collects, Haseltine said at a recent meeting of the Technology Council of Anne Arundel County, Md.

�In our business, actionable knowledge is someone we need to get before they get us,� he said. Haseltine envisions software that can, as he says, connect the dots. It must distinguish among people, places, events and time in documents and then relate these data entities to those in other documents and produce a summary of the combined elements.

To get this new analysis software, NSA has awarded a one-year, $445,000 contract to the Chesapeake Innovation Center of Annapolis, Md., to seek out information assurance technologies and informatics software being developed by industry and academia.

Here is the rest of the story.