Helping Analysts Deal with Data Overload: Profiling Profilers

Abstract

Intelligence analysts provide an incredibly important service toward maintaining our national security. They are chartered with providing the knowledge basis for decisions our national and military leaders make. Analysts must be depended upon to influence high-risk, time-critical, sometimes life-or-death decisions; thus, supporting their requirements is a vital goal for research and development efforts. In this paper, we focus on the cognitive aspects of analysts' information collection and filtering tasks, particularly of all-source analysts who continuously monitor message traffic. These analysts create synthesized reports for customers. We will discuss the issue of data overload and its effects, along with current lines of research on information retrieval. We end with a summary of our research effort examining filtering/profiling, to include approach and initial findings, towards our eventual goal of developing design seeds that can be incorporated into software tools to better support analysts' cognitive work.