DARPA chooses SAIC to develop next-generation intelligence-analysis system for Insight program
May 24, 2011
ARLINGTON, Va., 24 May 2011.Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) experts at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., needed help from industry to design a next-generation ISR exploitation and resource management system that compensates for core weaknesses in today's intelligence analysis. They found their solution from Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) in McLean, Va.DARPA awarded a $14 million contract to SAIC for the DARPA Insight program, which is intended to help U.S. intelligence experts detect threat networks, irregular warfare, and terrorist operations by combining intelligence information from imaging sensors, crowd-source and other social network or text-based sensors, as well as from other sources for further analysis.DARPA's awarded the contract to SAIC for the Insight Program last Friday, and the contract was announced today. The program seeks to fill gaps in current U.S. intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems that center on the inability to exploit and cross-cue several different intelligence sources automatically.
Today's U.S. intelligence systems generally connect intelligence sources to tactical operations centers manually by chat-based operator interaction. This can limit analysts' ability to deal with fast-moving and rapidly changing threats, which often require analysts to react within seconds.
Instead, the DARPA Insight program seeks to develop integrated human/machine reasoning into intelligence equipment to encompass operator knowledge and reasoning when dealing quickly with complex data from many different sensors. SAIC experts will concentrate on these areas in building the Insight next-generation ISR analysis system.
SAIC experts will build model-based behavioral correlation, modeling, prediction, and threat network analysis tools that combine intelligence information across many different sources automatically to improve the efficiencies of multi-intelligence sensors. The company also will develop a unified data-management and processing environment that integrates new intelligence sensors and software algorithms.
For the DARPA Insight program, SAIC also will develop the Insight Test Bed to help evaluate intelligence analysis approaches. For more information contact DARPA online at www.darpa.mil, or SAIC at www.saic.com.
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
