Intelligence After Next: What Are We Waiting For? Today’s Technologies Can Improve the Business of All-Source Intelligence Analysis Now

The Intelligence Community (IC) is focused on developing and deploying future cutting edge technical capabilities—including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning—to support all source intelligence analysis. In the interim, existing technologies, especially human language technology and natural language processing capabilities, available in the commercial world for years, should be deployed to ease analysts’ workload while making them more efficient until these future systems are operational.

Improvements in the following areas would have the greatest impact on the day-to-day work of an analyst:

• Information retrieval. Deployment of non-Boolean search capabilities and a desktop search application will provide analysts with the means to use other search strategies to find needed information, as well as free analysts from the frustration of spending considerable time searching for data saved in electronic folders and drives.
• Information filtering to facilitate knowledge discovery through the integration of information extraction and summarization with existing agency information retrieval tools to assist analysts in reviewing large numbers of search returns as well as identify unexpected relationships.

Ultimately analysts need a capability that will decrease the time it takes to search for relevant information and provide them with more time to think, analyze, and write. Such a capability should not only provide federated search of IC data repositories, but also automatically extract and filter information, as well as push data in the correct formats so that they can be visualized in other applications.