IARPA Considering Virtual Worlds Data Analysis
Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) generated buzz in the virtual worlds community in February when reports of Reynard, a data-mining project meant to identify criminal or terrorist activity in virtual worlds, hit the public. In a new Q&A with IEEE, IARPA Director Lisa Porter talked about her other plans, including developing a division to focus on Incisive Analysis that might make use of virtual worlds for information processing. "Analysts are drowning in reams and reams of data," said Porter. "It's called the tsunami effect—the overwhelming amount of data and information that they have to analyze. How can they go through it all fast enough to provide decision makers with analysis in time? There's so much information out there—I mean, just go look at YouTube. Think about the information in your life—all the e-mails that you don't have time to read. In this office, we're hoping to get smarter about data analysis, maybe by using virtual worlds."
"How do we leverage some of the creative ideas that might be out there to help our analysts get their arms around all this data?" Porter asked. "And there's another, multidisciplinary aspect of this problem: ideally, you want to understand not just what's being said but the cultural implications as well."
That's something various groups are already looking into. The Thetus Corporation, a knowledge management organization, demoed a set-up on Microsoft Virtual Earth to let users process geospatial intelligence visually. There's also the Analyst Space for Exploitation, which is developing a virtual world for tracking events in real-time that allows analysts to move back and forth across time and space to get snapshots of changing situations
And, as far as collaboration goes, Forterra and IBM have been working on the Babel Bridge platform to tie different agencies together. Expected to roll out this year, Babel Bridge came about in part due to Forterra's relationship with In-Q-Tel, which is also working with IARPA. There's no mention of whether or not IARPA will make use of any of those projects, though.
The Incisive Analysis division was apparently behind the Reynard proposal as well. This is all very serious--and neat--work, obviously, but I for one really get a kick out of the idea that there could be a group of people conducting behavioral analysis in Second Life and then immediately feeding that data back into a proprietary, IARPA-built virtual world. Hopefully the loop will just repeat indefinitely.
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