NGA on Oct. 6, 2021 launched a brand new information technique.
GEOINT 2021: The explosion of obtainable observational information concerning the Earth and human exercise around the globe is difficult the power of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to have the ability to make sense of all of it — particularly on the shortened timelines desired by warfighters, mentioned the company’s director, Vice Adm. Robert Sharp.
“The growth in GEOINT data from government and commercial sources here and around the world is staggering. This exponential growth in data leads us to one of our biggest challenges: managing all of the data,” Sharp mentioned in his keynote Wednesday on the GEOINT 2021 convention in St. Louis, Mo., sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.
“Kind of like the mountains Lewis and Clark had to scale, data is a mountain we have to climb,” he mentioned. “So, as I see it, it’s critical that we team up with others who are experts in data integration.”
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Sharp pointed business to the brand new “NGA Data Strategy,” launched Wednesday, as a software to know the company’s wants. The technique’s objectives are “to make data easily accessible, improve its reusability and improve cross-domain efficiencies,” he confused.
NGA should transfer to “treat data as a strategic asset,” Sharp mentioned. “So, our objective is to create, manage and securely share trusted data with the speed, accuracy and precision that our customers missions demand.”
The Data Strategy has 4 focus areas to information “investments in people and technology,” he defined: “First we have to have data that can be intuitively discovered, easily accessed and responsibly shared with those who need it. Second, we have to improve data assets so that they can be easily reused for both anticipated and unanticipated purposes. Third, our customers and workforce have to be able to efficiently find data across different security domains. And lastly, we need artificial intelligence and machine learning, to enhance our production capacity, as well as the mission impact of our GEOINT products.”
A ‘Huge Focus’ On AI, Automation
“Leveraging automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning is a huge focus for us right now,” Sharp famous. “We want to be able to produce automated observations that both our analysts and customers can easily use.”
The company’s first Technology Strategy, launched final May, “talks about building AI enabled solutions, alongside our users — so we have our tech experts sitting side by side with our mission experts,” Sharp mentioned. The company additionally has simply up to date the technique’s accompanying “Tech Focus Areas” doc, and whereas it doesn’t differ enormously from the primary model launched together with final 12 months’s overarching technique, Sharp mentioned it goes into extra particulars about NGA’s wants.
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Sharp famous that the navy providers and “joint warfighters” within the Combatant Commands “are already experimenting with automated decision support in support of future joint warfighting concepts.” Military prospects of NGA-provided GEOINT info — merchandise like maps and exact focusing on coordinates — are “challenging us to get machines to understand where that data needs to go, how fast it needs to go, what format it needs to be in, and driving it across the infrastructure like a Smart Content Delivery Network.”
Indeed, Northern Command particularly has been within the forefront of experimenting with AI determination aides to help Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which is a foundational ingredient of DoD’s new Joint Warfighting Concept launched in March and now being fleshed out.
