Artificial Intelligence to Sort Through ISR Data Glut.

• Author: Harper, Jon

Inundated with more data than humans can analyze, the U.S. military and intelligence community are banking on machine learning and advanced computing technologies to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The Defense Department operates more than 11,000 drones that collect hundreds of thousands of hours of video footage every year. The intelligence community captures more than three NFL seasons worth of high-definition imagery data each day with a single sensor in a single combat theater, according to officials.

"When it comes to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or ISR, we have more platforms and sensors than at any time in Department of Defense history," said Air Force Lt. Gen. John NT. "Jack" Shanahan, director for defense intelligence (warfighter support) in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

"It's an avalanche of data that we are not capable of fully exploiting," he said at a technology conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by Nvidia, a Santa Clara, California-based artificial intelligence computing company.

For example, the Pentagon has deployed a wide-area motion imagery sensor that can look at an entire city. But it takes about 20 analysts working around the clock to exploit just 6 to 12 percent of the data collected, Shanahan said. "The rest disappears, maybe goes into some forensics database somewhere like the Indiana Jones vault."

As the ISR flow continues to increase, the challenge is becoming more and more acute. "We do not have more people to keep throwing at the problem," he said.

Even if the intelligence community had many more analysts on its payroll, it would still be physically impossible for humans alone to handle the volume of content available, according to a report by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The CIA is facing a similar predicament, said Matthijs Broer, chief technology officer at the spy agency's science and technology directorate.

"The analytical capabilities... required to analyze that data for us really has been challenged significantly" in recent years, he said at a technology summit in Washington, D.C, hosted by Defense One.

Not having enough analysts to examine all of the video footage and other incoming data isn't the only problem that officials are grappling with. Being able to exploit the intelligence information in a timely manner is also a challenge.

The Pentagon has analysts staring at full-motion video for up to 12 hours at a time. They have to digest what they're seeing. They sometimes can't brief decision-makers until many hours after a significant event has occurred, Shanahan said.

The NGA in its "GEOINT CONOPS 2022" report noted the drawbacks of having limited automation...