Abstract
The Intelligence Community's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) recently issued 17 contracts for innovative, creative, and high-risk research to advance the state-of-the-art in technologies and methods for supporting the intelligence analyst in discovering “novel intelligence from massive data” (NIMD). An important feature of this initiative is the role it gave to cognitive factors. The Call-for-Participation said, “Thus, NIMD is about human interaction with information in a way that permits intelligence analysts to spot the telltale signs of strategic surprise in massive data sources — building tools that capitalize on human strengths and compensate for human weaknesses to enhance and extend analytic capabilities.” This symposium will provide a brief overview of NIMD as well as project reports from four of the teams that won NIMD contracts. While the approaches and projects are diverse, all attempt to bring an understanding of cognitive factors and quantitative approaches to bear on improving the intelligence analyst's success at extracting hidden patterns from massive databases.
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