Automation key to tackling burdensome big data problems.

• Author: Parsons, Dan

(*) When two bombs exploded last year near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, law enforcement officials w'ere inundated with an unprecedented deluge of information in their search for suspects.

For die first time in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, investigators had almost immediate access to phone records, surveillance footage, first-responder communications, cell-phone photos and time-stamped high definition video from dozens of angles.

Information technology systems provided a bounty of data regarding the bombing scene but were not yet up to the task of digesting that data into useful intelligence, said Peder Jungck, chiel technology' officer for BAE Systems Intelligence & Security sector.

"Someone, somewhere, had an 'Aha' moment while looking at all of that information," Jungck told National Defense. "The idea was, could they search the video and photographic data for people who were not running away from the bombs or looked unafraid? It had never been done before, but the technology was available. And it led to the two suspects."

So-called activities-based intelligence (ABI] allows analysts to synthesize mountains of information and look for anomalies, rather than consuming video, audio or other data in linear, chronological order.

BAE was not involved in the search for die bombing suspects, but has developed methods of automating the synthesis of ABI for the military and government agencies.

"Our focus is to help the government get value out of all that data being collected," Jungck said. "Flow do you go and cull that information to help the government not be surprised by world events and save lives by taking human intelligence, signals intelligence, geo-intelligence and everything else, get them all in the same time and space and use them to your advantage?"

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in January- released a broad agency announcement seeking research proposals to tackle a similar issue in the study of cancer. The program, called the "Big Mechanism," seeks to establish a system in which the wealth of complex and disparate medical research can be automatically analyzed for patterns and conclusions, much in the way the overlapping and interlocking data sets from the Boston Marathon finish line did.

"Some of the systems that matter most to the DoD are very complicated," the solicitation said. "Ecosystems, brains, economic and social systems have many parts and processes, but diey are studied piecewise, and...