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After major terrorist attacks, pieces of information that could have potentially prevented or mitigated the threat are often found. The problem faced by analysts at national security institutions is not one of lacking intelligence, but of an overabundance of data, and a lack of resources to cope with it.
The Pattern Analytics to Support High-Performance Exploitation and Reasoning (PANTHER) team at Sandia National Laboratories (wholly owned by Lockheed Martin) is working on solutions to this problem, and has made a number of breakthroughs that have the potential to save many lives.
The team is working on a number of solutions to allow analysts to sift through enormous quantities of data in a smarter, faster, and more effective manner. “PANTHER developed the foundation for transforming how massive, complex data sets can be quickly analyzed to provide the nation’s decision-makers with new perspectives on situations and circumstances,” said Anthony Medina, director of Sandia’s Radio Frequency & Electronic Systems Center.
PANTHER’s innovations include a novel method of comparing motion and trajectories, new software to represent sensor data coupled with additional information in a searchable way, and fundamental research on visual cognition. This research could have a number of application, like tracking flight patterns, with the system alerting an analyst to any deviation from a predicted route. Another application is an easy to use visual representation of a geographic location’s topography and building, with relevant data attached to features on the image.
The team hopes to enhance software design using their fundamental research in cognitive science, and to develop new tools to help valuable and important information and trends easier to analyse and reveal.
“If an analyst is collecting information on a specific location over time and learns that something of interest might be occurring there, they probably don’t have the tools they need to quickly gather and analyze information from all relevant data sets that might corroborate the forecast. But PANTHER is probably the nation’s best bet right now to get to that point quickly,” says Medina.
