We've previously heard about A-SpaceX, a virtual world for intelligence agency collaboration and analysis that tracks that lets agents look at data from around the world and across different time frames, but it looks like the project is picking up steam. The Office of the Director for National Intelligence, IARPA, and the Air Force Research Laboratory recently announced an Industry Day for A-SpaceX, July 8 from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm at the University of Maryland; the afternoon will feature private conversations upon request. The hosts plan to simulcast the event in Second Life and via webcast, but it looks like interested parties will need to request an invitation. If I weren't out of the country, I'd try to catch this if only becuase the project sounds fascinating. Read the full announcement or catch the highlights below.
"A-SpaceX is seeking to create an analytic environment where the workspace becomes an enabler for the analytic process – fostering creativity and effective analytic reasoning," explains the announcement. "A-SpaceX envisions two key emerging technologies being fused in the workstation of the future to exploit the information available to the intelligence analyst: Virtual worlds, and Workflow management."
In this case, A-SpaceX is planned to include multiple virtual worlds, each targeted at specific kinds of decision making, though the goal is to make them interoperable to allow analysts to jump from one to another.
Automated agents will crawl the worlds for relevant information that, it seems, will be accessed through one interface, though tied in to both the virtual worlds and legacy applications. That leads to the multi-faceted approach of the agencies for this first phase of A-SpaceX: determine common elements of virtual worlds from both a conceptual point of view and technological to integrate them with legacy apps; explore and develop the technology for the worlds' Time Machine functions, moving back and forth through different possible situations; and develop MindSnaps technology aimed at helping analysts limit themselves to only the important information for each decision.
"We cannot control the types of problems that future analysts might face," concludes the announcement. "We cannot control the demands for understanding information and the pressure for faster decision making. We can, however, provide the analyst with an environment that encourages creativity, reasoning, collaboration with internal and external experts, rapid exploration of alternate perspectives for greater understanding, and detecting change in data and through processes within a multi-dimensional information rich synthetic world. Welcome to A-SpaceX where it’s about… the future."
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