GEOINT 2012: Much to Do even with Looming Budget Cuts

By Art Kalinski

In a repeat performance, USGIF (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) put on a superb conference that was really informative and well executed. GEOINT has always been a serious conference with very little partying, but this year was more so with the leadership even eliminating the traditional closing night social. The social events never were excessive in the past but no one wanted even a hint of over indulgence. It wasn’t missed, because quite frankly there was too much to see and too much to do to spend time on frivolity.

As in past years, there were so many noteworthy presentations. With more than 248 exhibitors in the Expo, it was impossible to see and hear it all. So this is just one man’s limited view of a mega conference. Luckily, many of the key presentations are on the USGIF website as daily summaries. See ShowDaily 1-5 and videos clips (make sure select the 2012 clips and not previous years).

Director of National Intelligence and keynote speaker James Clapper

The opening keynote was delivered by the director of National Intelligence, The Honorable James Clapper, who directly addressed two elephants in the room — sequestration and his take on the Benghazi attack. First he discussed several issues: the INCITE program to have an enterprise data model in the “cloud” by 2018, which he said was moving along nicely. He tied in the need for multi-int data such as GEOINT, SIGINT, MASINT, etc. and also expressed his concern that improvements were needed to speed up the clearance process. He cited reciprocity, so clearances would carry over from one agency and contract to others as a big issue.

Then he got to elephant one — sequestration. He said that it would be devastating to the intel community because there is no way to prioritize programs. Important programs would see the same cuts as less critical programs which could prove very dangerous.

The second elephant was the recent attack at Benghazi and death of four diplomatic staff members including the Ambassador. Director Clapper took a jab at our politicians and quoted a recent article by Paul R. Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that he said was thoughtful and resonated well with him.

“Information about lethal incidents is not total and immediate. The normal pattern after such events is for explanations to evolve as more and better information becomes available. We would and should criticize any investigators who settled on a particular explanation early amidst sketchy information and refused to amend that explanation even when more and better information came in. A demand for an explanation that is quick, definite and unchanging reflects a naive expectation — or in the present case, irresponsible politicking.” You can view Director Clapper’s full keynote here.

NGA Director Letitia Long addresses the opening session crowd

NGA Director Latisha Long

Director Clapper was followed by NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) Director Letitia Long, who discussed current efforts at NGA. She cited continuous creation of ever more capable applications. One example permitted a single user to locate a hard-to-find feature in imagery that took 10 minutes, which previously would have taken several analysts days to complete. She stated that during the past year NGA had developed more than 150 apps that are currently in their “app store.” Her goal was to have the majority of future apps created by commercial developers. They are even considering an “Apple iPhone like” commercial model that would pay compensation to developers based on the number of downloads and users rather than cumbersome and limited contracts.

Additionally, she spoke of their work to build a Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for NGA and DIA, which will soon top 2,000 users and is expected to grow to 60,000 users by the end of 2013. She said that through streamlining and redundancy elimination about 40 percent of their geospatial content is available to her users with a goal of 100 percent by next year.

This conference was an eye opener in that it was surprising how fast topics that were just sidebar discussions last year are moving to the forefront. Topics like human geography, social media, and pattern of life mapping seemed to be part of many presentations and some exhibitors. A few presentations stretched my concept of geospatial technology and tradecraft.

One of them was by Jeff Jonas, an IBM Fellow and chief scientist for IBM Entity Analytics, who gave a lunchtime keynote explaining work he was doing at IBM to help decipher seemingly duplicate data to cut processing time. He used a puzzle metaphor to explain his work with “big data.”

“Some of the pieces are missing, some of the pieces have errors, some of the pieces have fabricated lies,” he said, but by merging many different datasets a filtering occurs. He then explained an ultimate filter by using an example of two theoretical twins with the same IDs, same DNA, same accounts, etc. He said that with current technology we can now track the movements of individuals through their smartphones, and that unless the twins are joined at the hip, “Space time movement data is the ultimate biometric” and is one way to differentiate one person from another. This capability is also going test our concepts of privacy.

The GEOINT Expo

In the Expo area, there were more than 248 vendors ranging from the big companies such as Lockheed, Boeing, SAIC, and others to small start-ups at the fringe of the exhibit hall. Several were showing human geography / social media tools and numerous data storage and management solutions. I didn’t see much new hardware of note other than Ball Aerospace, who was showing the latest and greatly improved version of its Flash aerial LiDAR that can create 3D models draped with imagery continuously and in real time. This was so impressive that I’m going to learn more and write a column about it in the near future.

Klee Dienes, president of Hadron Industries and former medical helicopter pilot, demonstrated Hadron’s work developing hand-gesture language to use Oblong computer control equipment to navigate maps. Oblong Industries has developed equipment that permits touch-free control of applications just through the use of hand gestures, very much like in the science-fiction movie Minority Report. Oblong not only has equipment that can follow hand gestures using a special glove, but the technology has progress to tracking hand gestures in free space without special gloves. They also developed a special hand-gesture language called g-Speak. This technology is hard to describe and is best understood viewing video clips at the Oblong site.

Minority Report’s future tech.

Oblong Industries’ touch-free technology.

There were numerous presentations on the growing use of human geography and the growing need for not only geospatial technicians but of all things, social scientists. The only “wet blanket” attendee that voiced a concern during a question-and-answer session was an academic researcher who voiced a concern that social scientists were being used for intel work. He said that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) may have a problem with “weaponizing” social science. The speaker had a good answer in that he asked “How could the AAA have a problem with preventing war and reducing human misery?” My feeling, considering the stellar high-paying job market for social science majors, is why bite the hand that could feed you?

There was so much to cover in the human geography realm that in next month’s column, I will focus on the human geography aspect of GEOINT.