New software uses artificial intelligence to sift through data.

• Author: Insinna, Valerie
• Position: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

* As the military and U.S. intelligence agencies struggle to digest mountains of information captured from social media and sensors all over the world, companies continue to create software that can more quickly and accurately help analysts isolate relevant data.

One new platform under development, called Via, is able to independently scan data streams and alert users if patterns of interest are found, said Eric Little, vice president and chief scientist of Modus Operandi, a Melbourne, Florida-based software company.

Via features a "semantic reasoner," a type of artificial intelligence that applies human-like logic to find correlations among pieces of information, he said.

"A lot of intel analysis is about pattern analysis and pattern recognition. Analysts have lots of patterns in their heads that they understand," he said. Instead of having to manually search through data to build a case, they can codify what they are looking for into the Via software, and it will continuously run that algorithm and look for information that is similar.

"Think of it as very complex if-then statements. If someone is a member of this group, and they have some friends who are weapons dealers and they have some friends who are financiers, then they are probably linked to terrorist activities," he said.

Most legacy big data programs can perform statistical analysis, but cannot use logic to make more sophisticated connections among multiple pieces of information, Little said. For instance, older software can map hot zones...