"In general, time-critical decision processes require advanced data fusion techniques and innovative visualization capabilities to support the decision making process. It is our position, however, that systems involving complex environments, such as thecockpit of a tactical aircraft, require much… More

Achieving system-level optimization across all sensor/weapon system functions with subsystems that are designed to perform optimally on a specific function is a difficult challenge. In Phase I of this SBIR we demonstrated the utility of applying advancedBayesian network techniques to perform… More

In the future Ballistic Missile Defense system, it will be necessary to coordinate the operations of many geographically dispersed system components to create an architecture with the best chance for defeating the threat. Though challenging, it is desiredthat this architecture be implemented in a… More

The Decisive Analytics Corporation (DAC) Team has a unique combination of skills, technology, and experience that allows us to demonstrate an advanced approach for distributed sensor data fusion in Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) engagements using Bayesian Networks. We seek to extend the success of… More

Fusion 2+ as it relates to air-to-air engagements involves pressing real time constraints and very large amounts of imperfect data. Real-time data acquired under an air-to-air engagement will have different types of imperfection; two representative classes of imperfection are vagueness and ambiguity… More

The Army's Unit of Action (UA) is part of a joint team that is decisive in any operation, against any level threat, in any environment. This team must be strategically and operationally responsive, and be able to change patterns of operations faster than the enemy can respond. To meet these goals,… More

The Army's Unit of Action (UA) is part of a joint team that is decisive in any operation, against any level threat, in any environment. This team must be strategically and operationally responsive, and be able to change patterns of operations faster than the enemy can respond. To meet these goals,… More

The DECISIVE ANALYTICS Team presents a suite of novel technique to perform distributed event correlation across distinct administrative domains while preserving privacy. Our approach for detecting attacks is based on the facts, prerequisites, and consequences of an attack. Such an approach allows us… More

Tactical aircraft pilots are provided with ever increasing amounts of information about the battlefield and the threats they face, providing the opportunity for achieving overwhelming information superiority over our adversaries. This potential faces two difficult challenges: 1) each aircraft must… More

The Army Commander is currently overwhelmed with data and lacks techniques to turn this information into actionable intelligence. This "data rich, knowledge poor" environment requires the appropriate set of tools to parse the incoming data stream, identify concepts and their relationships, and turn… More

The Navy's DD(X) program is the centerpiece of a family of three surface combatant ships, including a destroyer, a cruiser and a smaller craft for littoral operations. The scope and complexity of the design work, which includes development and integration of new hull and ship systems as well as… More

The operational commander must interpret large amounts of real-time, imperfect data from multiple heterogeneous sources in order to perform Battle Damage Assessment (BDA). The challenge is to develop a semi-automated BDA system that will provide the commander with accurate, relevant and timely… More

The DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation (DAC) Team will develop a prototype system that will demonstrate how the BMDS can utilize battlefield learning technologies to support both non-real-time and real-time adaptability throughout the course of the BMDS mission. Our approach, called a Work Centered… More

Communication rates in UAV operations can be poor, intermittent, and asynchronous due to mitigating factors within the operating environment such as equipment limitations, equipment configurations, terrain effects, and weather conditions. The objective of this research effort is to demonstrate the… More

The Army's Future Combat System (FCS) initiative aims to enable the army's transformation into a more strategically responsive force, capable of rapid deployment and effective operations in all types of military operations. Enabling this initiative is the concept of Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The… More

The GIG and other tactical networks are highly dynamic and contain an unknown number of data sources at any point in time. The number of data sources on these networks is growing at a much faster pace than our ability to discover them and process the information they provide into usable… More

Effects Based Operations (EBO) is defined as "a process for obtaining a desired strategic outcome or "effect" on the enemy, through the synergistic, multiplicative, and cumulative application of the full range of military and nonmilitary capabilities at the tactical, operational, and strategic… More

Battlefield Learning (BL) is the process of understanding what is observed (enemy & own actions) in the command center and correctly adapting our actions to lead to a positive outcome. The character of BL is the coherent union of man & machine that will best provide adaptability to off-nominal and… More

The Missile Defense Agency's (MDA) Project Hercules has been charged with developing advanced algorithms for the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Under the Decision Architecture task, a Battle Manager (the DABM) has been developed to model the end-to-end BMDS. This simulation testbed… More

We will design and implement an interface between the Paramesh computational libraries, developed and used by groups at NASA GSFC, and the Cactus computational framework, developed primarily by scientists at Louisiana State University, the RI on this proposal. Our innovation falls in the domain of… More

The scope and complexity of the DD(X) design, which includes the integration of new advanced combat systems in a Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), is unprecedented for the U.S. Navy. The intent of the DD(X) program is to incrementally insert new technologies into each block build of DD(X)… More

Over the last several years, the United States Military has been undergoing a radical transition from a traditional "platform-centric" force to one capable of performing in a state-of-the-art "Network-Centric" environment. With this transformation comes the challenge of creating and maintaining a… More

The DDS and other tactical networks are highly dynamic and contain an unknown number of data sources at any point in time. The number of data sources on these networks is growing at a much faster pace than our ability to discover them and process the information they provide into usable… More

The US military is rapidly embracing the concept of Effects-Based Operations (EBO), beginning a transformation from current strategies based on attrition and annihilation of opponents through brute military force, to a methodology that employs any and all elements of national power (Diplomatic,… More

Acquiring probabilistic knowledge for the development of fusion models can prove to be a difficult task. In many applications, the lack of availability of historical data forces the modelers to rely extensively on Expert Judgment techniques which traditionally requires a large amount of manpower… More

The DAC Teams proposes to extend to the Space Situational Awareness domain existing sensor resource management algorithms that we have developed and will be deployed on the operational Ballistic Missile Defense System in 2006. Our current algorithms accept warfighter inputs defining the relative… More

We propose to build a sensor resource management algorithm that builds tasking plans that account for both discrimination and tracking information. This approach, which uses a value of information construct to prioritize tasks based on warfighter-defined value, extends our earlier work in which we… More

Our approach, termed the GeoSpatial Temporal Evidential Reasoning System (GEO-STEERS), is comprised of three key steps termed: Network Formulation, Network Testing, and Network Evaluation. In combination, these three steps provide the capabilities to discover relationships, patterns and connections… More

Under this SBIR, the Decisive Analytics Corporation (DAC) team addresses two niche capabilities that are not currently addressed in the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). We propose describing the problems of tracking and discrimination within a single, hybrid, dynamic Bayesian network model.… More

Attacks using Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are the leading cause of U.S. combat deaths and injuries in Iraq. Despite our efforts, the enemy has proven adaptable to our tactics, techniques, and procedures to stop, negate, or minimize the damage of the blast. To overcome this problem we must… More

Acquiring probabilistic knowledge for the development of fusion models can prove to be a difficult task. In many applications, the lack of availability of historical data forces the modelers to rely extensively on expert judgment techniques which traditionally requires a large amount of manpower and… More

In working with our Phase I sponsor, we identified a clear opportunity to develop an advanced BMDS Human Machine Interface (HMI) mockup that can serve as the platform for testing, training, and refinement of advanced algorithms in the BMDS. We will build out the results of our Phase I algorithm… More

The asymmetric threat poses perhaps the most dangerous risk to US forces and assets both overseas and at home. The sheer amount of data that needs to be analyzed in order to identify suspicious entities and networks is analogous to finding a needle in a haystack. To overcome this problem we must… More

Our proposal supports the development and integration of sensor resource management algorithms in the operational BMDS by developing and modeling new network messages required to enable centralized control of sensors. The current message set on the system does not provide sufficient control to… More

The asymmetric threat poses perhaps the most dangerous risk to US forces and assets both overseas and at home. Because of the sheer amount of data available, building dynamic, complex social networks to represent terrorist activities can be very difficult. To overcome this problem, we must identify… More

Today's threats tend to maneuver in commercial vehicles through dense, cluttered urban streets where detection and tracking become exceptionally difficult. First, the high volume of background traffic makes it difficult to maintain tracks within the clutter of large numbers of confusing targets. … More

Decisive Analytics proposes build a executive sensor resource management algorithm that (1) extends the algorithm successfully demonstrated in Phase I to globally task sensors to meet system tracking and discrimination needs; (2) is tailored to work with discrimination fusion engine algorithms… More

Under this Phase II SBIR, the Decisive Analytics Corporation (DAC) team proposes two advanced capabilities that are not currently supported in the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). Employing ground-breaking techniques developed under Phase I of this effort for describing and solving the… More

Our proposal and the Phase I work completed under it addressed these NASA-identified needs by providing software infrastructure that provides physical scientists a "plug-and-play" architecture in which they can insert their "physics kernels" and exploit very large existing code bases for the… More

A high-quality SIAP is the essential foundation of effective air defense, reliable combat identification and is the key to exploiting advanced offensive capabilities. To develop an effective SIAP, the tracking and fusion algorithms must overcome real-world challenges such as high target density,… More

We propose a "model-of-models" approach for building a Bayesian Prognostic Failure Model that will meet Army IAMD requirements for the ASoSC2. The model-of-models approach closely parallels the system-of-systems approach pursued by the Army for fielding its weapon, sensor, and C2 systems. It is… More

Conventional statements of logic (e.g., simple statements of the form "if x then y") allow individuals and machines to make quick and efficient determinations of the state of the world through the rules of deduction. This type of reasoning, however, does not naturally accommodate a fundamental and… More

Despite significant research, engagement management algorithms have not matured to the point of deployability - even the most advanced algorithms are still considered developmental. One reason for the absence of global engagement management algorithms in the deployed system is that providing good… More

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) has amplified the need for rapid response operations, requiring the ability to support the missions through the formation of ad-hoc joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) teams from assets that are on station and available. To provide this… More

During Phase I of this research, we developed the GeoSpatial Temporal Evidential Reasoning System (GEOSTEERS) Phase I to III vision. GEOSTEERS provides the necessary capabilities for users to interactively transfer subject matter knowledge and experience into computational probability models. … More

Missile defense systems will always require a real-time weapon/target pairing capability. Although extensive preplanning can give the defender general guidance for a variety of enemy courses of action, the combinatorial explosion of possible ways an engagement can evolve makes explicit enumeration… More

A high-quality Single Integrated Air Picture (SIAP) is the essential foundation of effective air defense, reliable combat identification and is the key to exploiting advanced offensive capabilities. To develop an effective SIAP, the tracking and fusion algorithms must overcome real-world challenges… More

Under this SBIR, the Decisive Analytics Corporation (DAC) team proposes a novel solution to creating a clear and timely space asset threat picture from available intelligence data by recognizing and anticipating hostile space activities. The DAC solution is a supervised learning approach that mines… More

The performance of the Ballistic Missile Defense System depends on a number of factors; one of the most important is the ability to accurately and efficiently discriminate between threats (reentry vehicles) and non-threats (decoys). The DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation (DAC) team proposes to develop… More

The proliferation of the battlefield with UAVs and stationary cameras has created a virtual mountain of video data. Some of that data gets analyzed thoroughly, but most does not. It is simply archived away. Buried within this mountain of video data is a virtual treasure trove of valuable… More

Discovering the important evidence in the form of activities, actors and relationships in a sea of open source data requires the ability to extract and correlate seemingly unrelated pieces of data, distinguish that data from the noise of harmless civilian activity and find the hidden attributes and… More

Technology to aid in the understanding of intelligence data has not kept pace with the technology used to generate and store the data. This imbalance has led to a situation where the time required for an analyst to understand the content of a data set and mine the relevant information far exceeds… More

If given the opportunity, a terrorist organization such as al Qaeda could unleash Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear (CBRN) material in future attacks. Accordingly, future CBRN combat system requirements include an online network of traditional and non-traditional CBRN sensors to improve… More

In an insurgency - a type of conflict characterized as a "learning contest" due to the extreme flexibility and adaptability of insurgent tactics and operations - the force that is able to perform the most thorough and rapid exploitation of its intelligence data will gain an important advantage. This… More

The U.S. Army Natick Soldier Center (NSC) and Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA) are leading an effort to develop a robust constructive force-on-force simulation that accurately represents individual Ground Soldiers (GS) and dismounted Small Combat Units (SCU). The purpose of the… More

Joint Space Operations Center under the United States Strategic Command employs a worldwide network of 29 sensors, known as the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), to track more than 17,000 man-made objects in Earth orbit with sizes 10 centimeters or larger. Decisive Analytics Corporation and the… More

Single-reference coupled cluster (SRCC) methods have revolutionized our ability to accurately predict molecular energies and properties. As new developments in theory and computer science extend the application of SRCC methods to larger and larger systems, advancements in coupled cluster methods… More

Identifying non-cooperative and potentially hostile vehicles is of the utmost importance to the operators of manned and un-manned surveillance aircraft. Utilizing ISAR imagery has been one method for performing target identification by many organizations. However, the complicated motions of the… More

Public reports of the successful test of kinetic kill anti-satellite weapons, "off the shelf" radio frequency (RF) jammers, and high-powered lasers used to blind orbiters demonstrate that both nations and non-state actors have access to effective anti-satellite offensive warfare capabilities. Also,… More

A critical capability associated with space C2 is the ability to develop and analyze alternative courses of action (COAs) based on SSA and other intelligence sources and clearly define the cost and benefit associated with each option. However, the current COAs are primarily static or template driven… More

Conflicts in the world have shifted toward asymmetric warfare. As a result, the methodology for attaining situational awareness has been drastically altered as the number of variables directly impacting situational awareness (i.e. behavioral patterns and social networks), their rates of change, and… More

We propose to create a discrimination engine for the Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) based on the concept of manifold learning algorithms. Manifold learning algorithms have come to prominence within the computer vision community as a type of feature extraction algorithm which does not… More

The U.S. Army Natick Soldier RD&E Center (NSRDEC) and Army Materiel Systems Analysis Activity (AMSAA) are leading an effort to develop a robust constructive force-on-force simulation that accurately represents individual Ground Soldiers (GS) and dismounted Small Combat Units (SCU). The purpose of… More

Discovering the important evidence in the form of activities, actors and relationships in a sea of open source data requires the ability to extract and correlate seemingly unrelated pieces of data, distinguish that data from the noise of harmless civilian activity and find the hidden attributes and… More

Without a deep understanding of causes, context, and meaning of the events they observe, Warfighters are unable to reliably develop or execute effective courses of action. Unfortunately, traditional methods of accessing this information require significant effort searching large volumes of… More

Previous efforts to improve Anti-Submarine Warfare situational understanding have focused on developing fusion techniques for improving the tactical picture. These fusion processes primarily operate on"hard"sensor data that is amenable to software implementation. The Navy now seeks to… More

Without some way to acquire or access insight into the social dynamics of battlespace populations, Warfighters will operate with a limited or inaccurate understanding of the human terrain and an impeded ability to explain current social behavior and to pr

Terrorist organizations and other covert groups operate in independent units dispersed throughout the battlespace. Their structure and continuously adapting tactics present a complex and subtle profile that can be difficult to detect and track. In operations against such enemies, detailed… More

Tactical Warfighters demand rapid information fusion capabilities to develop and maintain accurate situational awareness and understanding of dynamic enemy threats in asymmetric military operations. The ability to extract meaning in relationships between people, objects, and locations from a variety… More

ABSTRACT: Technology to aid in the understanding and exploitation of text has not kept pace with the technology used to generate, record, transmit and store the data. The mismatch between the fire hose of text production and the soda straw of text consumption is particularly severe in systems that… More

ABSTRACT: The Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) under the United States Strategic Command employs a network of 29 sensors, known as the Space Surveillance Network (SSN), to track more than 17,000 objects in Earth orbit. Because the number of objects is large compared to the number of sensors,… More

ABSTRACT: We propose to create a multi-sensor, multi-wavelength tracking and fusion algorithm to be used for precise tracking of space objects. The algorithm developed within this work will incorporate overlapping measurements from both Electro-Optical and Radio Frequency sensors. We will base… More

To keep abreast of groups and individuals operating in a particular area, US forces gather vast amounts of intelligence. Extracted from this sea of information are the entities that exist in the data. We have made great leaps in entity extraction technology. The next challenge is to overcome entity… More

ABSTRACT: A critical capability associated with space C2 is the ability to develop and analyze alternative courses of action (COAs) based on SSA and other intelligence sources and to clearly define the cost and benefit associated with each option. However, the current COAs are primarily static or… More

Current information retrieval methods provide an illusion of thorough data exploitation but in reality only consider a fraction of the data that is relevant to the Warfighter"s task. The fundamental reasons for this limitation are existing tools"inability to model the meaning of available… More

Today"s military decision makers are drowning in a sea of data, faced with a diverse set of problems to solve and a wide variety of information resources to draw upon. This situation is anything but static, as today"s rapidly evolving asymmetric conflicts generate a continuously changing… More

Advanced trajectory design and estimation capabilities in complex nonlinear dynamical regimes represent two of the greatest technical challenges of modern space flight. In addressing these challenges, DECISIVE ANALYTICS Corporation seeks to advance the capabilities of NASA's open source General… More