If you think you're overloaded with information, just imagine the intelligence analysts who are faced with sifting through truckloads of books, videos, maps, CDs, and other materials each day. Then there is the Internet. How can an analyst hope to discover the right answers to his or her questions—or better yet, discover what questions to ask—in a timely manner while rolling in this information tidal wave that spans heterogeneous sources, languages, and media?

What if someone could provide breakthrough tools and technologies to move analysts from today's search engine model (typing in keywords and getting massive amounts of documents) to getting direct answers to specific questions?

MITRE is helping the U.S. intelligence community (IC) with these and other information technology (IT) issues by organizing and managing the first-of-its-kind Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) for the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA). ARDA is a U.S. Government entity that sponsors and promotes IT research and development for the IC, which includes but is not limited to the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and National Reconnaissance Office. Addressing the possible impact of cutting-edge technologies, such as quantum computing, on communications security is just one of the concerns of the IC. How can it figure out how to better manage and analyze the vast amounts of data that exists now and is growing every day? And how can it deliver such information worldwide in a secure manner?

What is ARDA?

"ARDA's goal is to identify important or unique analytic challenges and emphasize revolutionary rather than evolutionary research to solve them," says Mark Maybury, NRRC Executive Director and MITRE's Executive Director of Information Technology. "That's why this is such an excellent partnership. MITRE has extensive knowledge and experience through our Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) in Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I), and we can swiftly bring expertise from across the corporation from multiple disciplines and technologies to support the NRRC. This also gives us the unique position to act as a focal point to bring together our region's most qualified scientific and business talent to work collaboratively with the government to solve its problems."

ARDA was created in November 1998 as a joint activity of the IC and the Department of Defense (DOD). Its program managers, physically located at the National Security Agency, come from across the IC and work with a panel of representatives throughout the IC to identify and advance science and technology solutions that focus on some of the most important and challenging IT problems faced by the IC today. ARDA sponsors "high-risk, high-payoff research" in three main areas:

• Quantum information science
• Information exploitation
• Global information systems access

Once needs in these three thrusts are identified, ARDA highlights the potential IT capabilities that might help resolve the problems and focuses multidisciplinary technological expertise against them through its own research programs, and now, through the NRRC. ARDA then assists in the transfer of possible solutions to the IC technology centers for integration and implementation. ARDA projects have well-defined goals with measurable results and are founded on sound scientific methodology, including experimental results, publication, and peer review.

MITRE and the NRRC

"In 2001 MITRE was asked to help create the NRRC to 'extend the IC fence line' outside of the Washington, D.C., area," says Maybury. "We are establishing partnerships among government and experts from industry and academia in the Northeast region that will center around a series of focused, eight-week workshops to actively solve IC problems."

MITRE and ARDA began by establishing an NRRC Executive Committee to define NRRC's mission, to guide NRRC efforts, and to act as an NRRC evangelist. The executive committee refined and prioritized the challenge areas NRRC would focus on in Summer 2002 in the area of solving the analyst's problem of how to answer questions rather than search by keywords. The executive committee created a program committee of national question-answering experts to oversee the first year of summer workshops. At the end of each workshop series, the executive committee assesses workshop results and recommends any follow-up investments. MITRE also created an NRRC Web site to help keep members informed and to communicate with the public.

Organizations participating in the NRRC include: BBN Technologies, Brandeis University, Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Hapax, Harvard University, Information Sciences Institute, IBM, IPhrase, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MERL, MITRE Corporation, Princeton University, Sonetech Corporation, State University of New York- Buffalo, University of Massachusetts, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, Syracuse University, Virage, World Wide Web Consortium, and numerous senior government experts. NRRC Workshop Series The NRRC summer 2002 workshops focused on ARDA's Advanced Question and Answering for Intelligence (AQUAINT) program. The specific challenges addressed at the workshops were: Temporal question answering—Enhancing natural language question answering systems to answer temporally based questions about the events and entities in news articles. Multiple perspectives question answering—Enhancing natural language question answering systems to find and characterize perspectives (e.g., facts vs. opinions, various political viewpoints) expressed in multiple global news sources. Re-use in question-answering systems—Maintaining prior knowledge (questions and answers) to help answer the same question later.

NRRC's mission: • Create scientific results that have a positive impact on IC problems. • Tap knowledge of world-class researchers (primarily in the northeast region, but extending internationally as warranted). • Provide access to a wide variety of expertise from university, FFRDC, military, and industrial resources. • Reinforce ARDA thrusts. • Infuse knowledge into the government workforce. • Transfer technology to and from industry.

Cross-Organization Collaboration

"The NRRC is an unprecedented opportunity and the first time the IC has joined with such a broad-based regional group to focus on important problems outside of their traditional business model," concludes Maybury. "MITRE's extensive background and current work in the areas under investigation, and our experience joining with experts from industry, academia, and government on projects over the years, will help us assist the NRRC to help ARDA achieve its goals."

Areas of Research

Quantum Information Science

The notion of quantum computing is based upon quantum mechanics, where elementary particles (such as electrons or the nuclei of atoms) can be used as the building blocks of computer memories and the behavior of quantum information is so different from that of classic forms of information that it is distinguished with a new concept, that of a quantum bit. With quantum information science, at any instant, the quantum computer is in a linear superposition of all its possible bit patterns. "Quantum technology flatly contradicts our common sense ideas of how the world works," says author Michael Crichton. "It posits a world where computers operate without being turned on and objects are found without looking for them. An unimaginably powerful computer can be built from a single molecule. Information moves instantly between two points, without wires or networks...[and] computers do their calculations in other universes."

ARDA's experimental program is studying the physical systems on which a future quantum computer might be based, while its theoretical program seeks to understand the possibilities and limitations of quantum computing, and quantum information science in general. Another interesting field under review is quantum cryptography, a technique that exploits the properties of quantum mechanics to allow separated parties to carry out unconditionally secret communications. This area in particular is one in which MITRE has experience. On July 27, 2000, MITRE became only the tenth organization in the world to successfully carry out quantum cryptography.

Information Exploitation

Exploitation of information is the core functionality necessary for an analytic process. At a minimum, information exploitation includes: content data transformation, content data mark-up, information retrieval, information discovery, analytic knowledge-bases, information understanding, assessment and interpretation, synthesis and fusion, and presentation and visualization. ARDA is currently focused on three specific programs to create advanced analytic tools for the exploitation and handling of structured and unstructured information through: (1) video analysis and content extraction; (2) geospatial visualization of intelligence information of all media types, including all types of written and spoken human language data in multiple languages while in multiple formats, and image data such as document images, photographs, and video; and (3) an advanced question-and-answer program focusing on abstract and technical data.

Novel Intelligence from Massive Data

The Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) program is aimed at focusing analytic attention on the most critical information found within massive data—information that indicates the potential for strategic surprise. Novel Intelligence is usable information not previously known to the analyst or policy makers. It gives the analyst new insight into a previously unappreciated or misunderstood threat. Massive data has multiple dimensions that may cause difficulty, some of which include volume or depth, heterogeneity or breadth, and complexity. That is, data may be "massive" because of the sheer quantity of similar items, typically a petabyte or more. Some intelligence data sources grow at the rate of four petabytes per month now, and the rate of growth is increasing. A smaller volume of data may nonetheless be considered "massive" because it consists of separately authored information objects in numerous types and formats: structured text in various formats, unstructured text, spoken text, audio, video, tables, graphs, diagrams, images, maps, equations, chemical formulas, etc.

Data may also be deemed "massive" because of its inherent complexity, which arises when a single document contains links between multiple information objects, with the meaning of any object dependent on information contained within other objects. Understanding the content of complex data requires being able to process data that has already been fused together, which is beyond the capability of current technology. A deeper level of complexity comes into play when information requires a variety of expertise for full comprehension because of the interconnectedness of the domains. For example, analysts might need to consider social, military, economic, political, governmental, scientific and technical issues surrounding an event or location.

Thus, NIMD is about human interaction with information in a way that permits intelligence analysts to spot the telltale signs of strategic surprise in massive data sources—building tools that capitalize on human strengths and compensate for human weaknesses to enhance and extend analytic capabilities.

Global Information Systems Access

The next generation of global information systems must function effectively in highly dynamic environments where mission objectives change at a moment's notice, networks must be swiftly reconfigured with little or no interruption in service, and users receive seamless access to vast amounts of globally distributed data. ARDA is working toward this goal with programs focused on: mobile networking; self-organizing networks that enable processes to self-organize to complete a task 'on the fly;' network security protection; resource-constrained networking technologies for wired and wireless networks that can accommodate dynamic resource constraints such as power, memory, and CPU availability; network modeling tools for mapping and managing highly complex, highly interconnected networks; and application engineering to understand the full capabilities and functionality of application software for enhancing collaboration.

—by Bob Roberge

Related Information

Websites

• Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC)

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