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AFRL awards $6.4 million contract to HNC Software

  • Published
  • By Francis L. Crumb
  • Air Force Research Laboratory Public Affairs
ROME, N.Y. --  The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate has awarded a $6,462,270 contract to HNC Software LLC, Advanced Technologies Group, of San Diego, Calif., for research to improve the capabilities of U.S. intelligence analysts around the world.

Under the 52-month award, HNC will develop, test, demonstrate and deliver key software components of a vision for machine cognition technology capable of autonomously organization and reasoning about data from sources such as text, images and video.

"This technology will be integrated into the Collaboration and Analyst/System Effectiveness (CASE) system to thoroughly capture tacit knowledge in a usable form for data integration, collaboration support, and geospatial reasoning - as well as to provide dramatically improved capabilities for hypothesis generation and tracking," said James M. Nagy, program manager in the directorate's Information and Intelligence Exploitation Division.

The CASE system focuses on improving the analytic process through advanced technology. Its purpose is not to eliminate the human expert as the orchestrator and director of analysis, but to surround the analyst with a variety of powerful yet transparent machine reasoning systems to augment the his or her abilities.

Examples of those systems include capturing and filtering a massive incoming data stream to expose both known and novel patterns; anticipating the information needs of the analyst and executing searches ahead of time, providing the analyst with instant results; detecting biases or missed possibilities in an analysis and offering alternative views of a situation; finding an expert, potentially in a separate agency, on a particular subject area bearing on an analysis; and unifying information across text, video, audio, and databases.

"The eventual goal of this research is to provide advanced technology to members of the U.S. intelligence community around the world so that they can better perform analysis of information relevant to security concerns," said Mr. Nagy.

Kelly M. Murer of the directorate's Contracting Division negotiated the HNC agreement.