NGA Workshop and ‘The Center’: Growing Opportunities for Our Geospatial Community

Several weeks ago, I attended a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Workshop conducted in Huntsville, Alabama. Of the numerous presentations, I found two especially interesting.

The first was a session by Sandra Broadnax, the director of the Small Business Programs Office for NGA. She gave a refreshingly energetic presentation about NGA’s efforts to build opportunities for small businesses in the geospatial community. The reason is twofold — NGA needs to meet federal guidelines to provide opportunities for small business, but even more important, NGA knows that there is a wealth of creative talent in the small-business sector that can address its requirements. So, if your firm is a small business, there may be some wonderful opportunities listed by NGA. And, very important, The agency is willing to help you get started. Go to www1.nga.mil, and click “Partners” and “Small Business Interaction” to get started. NGA also lists scholarships, internships and many unfilled full time positions.

Colonel Grimes

A second session, conducted by retired Army Colonel John Grimes, J.D. of the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), caught me by surprise since it was so broad in scope and stretched everyone’s concept of how geospatial science fits into our increasingly complex and treacherous cyber world. Col. Grimes, a seasoned Army Intelligence Officer who oversaw a staff of 180 intelligence analysts in Afghanistan, is now part of a broad interdisciplinary team started at UAB in 2011 addressing the growing field of cyber crime and intelligence. This center of excellence is simply called “The Center,” and it brings together a wide collection of professors, students and professional partners across many disciplines. Their focus is simple: “Making the world a safer place for citizens of the 21st century.”

This broad effort is supported by experts in cyber, geospatial, human factors, data systems, forensics, psychology, medicine, chemistry and many others with financial support from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, UPS and even the FBI. You have to have a “dizzying intellect” just to wrap your head around their collective work, which is too complex to explain in this short article. But I’ll give you a brief summary of their organization, which is divided into divisions called Pillars:

INFORMATION ASSURANCE/SECURITY — The division deals with the basic design of information/data systems. Are the systems designed with security in place? Does the system provide access to authorized users while excluding those who are not? Do the systems protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and systems that process, store, and/or transmit data. This is the underpinning of secure data systems and unfortunately most are less than perfect and continually under attack. When attacked, the action becomes a cyber crime.

CYBER CRIME – This division is the pillar that addresses attacks on information systems. As you know, these attacks are becoming more frequent, more creative, significantly more disruptive and potentially very dangerous. I was surprised to learn that more than 85% of the world’s email is spam, and more than 20,000 phishing websites are created every month. So this really is the core of the work at The Center.

“The Center” at UAB.

INTELLIGENCE ANALYTICS – This is the division headed up by Col. Grimes. As a lawyer and intelligence expert, he completed numerous cyber-security projects for major banks and businesses, and this hands-on real-world experience prepared him to build The Center team that analyzes cyber crimes using a variety of tools, including human behavioral patterns and anomalies, electronic intelligence, imagery and unique digital signatures. This team determines the nature and scope of cyber-attacks. They work not only to identify the “content” of attacks and criminals, but to understand the more complicated, interwoven and far reaching “context” of the action in the big picture cyber world.

FORENSIC SCIENCE — This division has been doing traditional crime scene forensics for many years using lab forensics that many of us have seen on television. With the growth of cyber crime, the division has evolved and expanded its tradecraft into the digital domain, requiring the development of completely new tools and techniques that combine unique biological and electronic “signatures” and patterns of cyber criminals.

HEALTH INFORMATICS is a newly developed division that will deal with cyber crime issues related to healthcare and associated professions. This could be significant, since pundits have voiced concerns that the Affordable Care Act seems to have weak web security in place.

DATA SCIENCE is another new division focusing primarily on “Big Data” ranging from social-media data mining to video and persistent surveillance analysis and crowd sourcing.

Dr. Parcak at The Center.

GEOSPATIAL SCIENCE is the division that I and most of you will find especially interesting. The division is headed up by Dr. Sarah Parcak, FSA who is also associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and CEO of SpectralGlobe technologies, a company that specializes in the use of remote-sensing technologies. Dr. Parcak brings an impressive resume to the division, including extensive experience using remote sensing to identify archeological site looting, a major terrorist revenue source. A graduate of Yale University, she went on to earn her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, is a 2012 TED fellow, and has appeared on the Discovery Channel, BBC and CNN. She also a National Geographic Society Fellow.

The Geospatial Science team uses a combination of high-resolution aerial/satellite imagery coupled with traditional GIS vector data to map and analyze the Earth’s surface. Operating in the cyber realm, team members also map and analyze data that was not even on our GIS radar a decade ago — data such as cyber networks, nodes and servers, social media footprints and temporal changes using traditional imagery, and persistent surveillance imagery and video.

The team also leverages its key industry partnerships to use the most cutting-edge software and approaches to analyze layers of image data to detect subtle patterns that otherwise may be overlooked.

WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT is an ultimate goal of The Center. Dealing with 21st-century criminals will require a workforce with skills and collections of skills that didn’t even exist 20 years ago. The students learn necessary technology and cyber skills to prepare them for entry-level and advanced positions in public and private organizations.

Opportunity

Talking with colleagues and staff at USGIF, there are other geospatial programs that have interdisciplinary collaborations with geospatial technology. However, UAB seems to have wrapped its arms around a powerful collection of talent and expertise to fill an urgent need while training cyber talent that is in great demand.

This column is a much-abbreviated description of The Center, so I strongly encourage you to visit the website, which contains a rich collection of information, papers and videoclips that describe the work and organization in detail. For more information contact Col Grimes at jwgrimes@uab.edu or Dr. Parcak.

If you are a geospatial professional looking for a growing segment of our community, this looks like a very promising and most interesting career path.