Teaching High School Students To Be Intel Analysts (Goerie.com)

The Erie City Schools, in cooperation with the Institute Of Intelligence Studies here at Mercyhurst, recently announced that they would begin to offer an intelligence analyst track in one of their high school career academies.

The full news article is here but there is more to this story. This is another one of Bob Heibel's visionary initiatives and it appears to me to be a natural extension of the increasing number of colleges and universities that are offering intelligence courses or even full programs.

While this may sound a bit too visionary for some, let me put it into perspective. We are in the middle of a study that is trying to get at the size, in dollars and people, of the "real" intelligence community. This real community includes all the law enforcement analysts and intelligence professionals in business as well as those in the national security community.

Our initial estimates indicate that there are as many analysts in the US national security community alone as there are petroleum engineers in the entire US (17,000). Our rough estimate suggests that, when you add in all of the law enforcement, competitive intel and other analysts in the business community, the total number of intel analysts in the US doubles. This exceeds the number of chemical engineers (30,000) in the country.

According to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the chemical engineering profession, however, has nearly 150 colleges and universities feeding it qualified graduates and STEM programs have become a staple offering in virtually every high school in the country. In contrast, there are only a handful (a growing handful but still a handful...) of colleges and universities offering even introductory intel courses, much less a full four year program.

Nearly 20 years ago, Bob started the Mercyhurt program based on a single insight: If the government can depend on academia to educate its entry level doctors and lawyers, engineers and architects, computer specialists and military officers, why can't it depend on academia to provide entry level education to its intelligence analysts? In this light, extending this vision to the high school level makes it seem less radical -- in fact, it looks downright logical.

Attention!! (Psyblog.org)

Made you look, eh?

Attention and the way we focus it are incredibly important aspects of intelligence analysis.

In the first place, there is some pretty good research to suggest that we learn what we attend to. Understanding where certain analytic methods focus our attention, then, allows us to determine what we might (or might not) learn from them. This, in turn, allows us to decide more rationally which method to choose for which situation.

Psyblog (via Elearnspace) has an interesting series of short articles that discuss these effects in much more detail. Specifically, these authors delve into seven additional aspects of attention:

• The Cocktail Party Effect
• The Attentional Spotlight
• Learning To Multitask
• Can Visual Attention Be Truly Divided?
  
• 18 Ways Attention Goes Wrong
• Attentional Blink And The Stream Of Consciousness
• How Meditation Improves Attention

I am currently working on a research project designed to develop the hardware and software for a human-computer interface that allows analysts to "optimize" their attention while doing their job on the move. The centrality of attention emerged early in this project and I suspect that the more I look at it, the more important it is going to become in a wide variety of analytic tasks. This short series of posts is a very good introduction to the topic.

Producing Intelligence Analysis From Patents (Original Research)

Jack Sandeen's exploration of patent analysis was a very interesting project to come out of my Advanced Analytic Techniques class this last term. Jack's case study focused on patents surrounding hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) but the really interesting stuff he discovered had to do with the process of patent analysis itself.

His report, built using Google Sites, provides a concise, useful overview of patents and patent analysis. He also provides a good strengths, weaknesses and how-to section and some very valuable resource pages (here and here). Some of the more interesting aspects of his case-study are the different ways he was able to visualize and analyze the data he collected (See one image below).

Patent Analysis clearly has its strengths and weaknesses and it certainly isn't appropriate for all types of intelligence problems. Where it is applicable, however, it seems to me that it is very powerful and can provide deep insights into technology trends and corporate capabilities. There is a pretty steep learning curve associated with its many tricks and traps, however, but I am glad Jack decided to tackle it. He has provided us all with a useful overview.

Related Post:
Using Search Engine Optimization Tools To Do Intel Analysis
Introduction To Pivot Tables in Intelligence Analysis
Visual Analysis Everywhere!

Visualizing YouTube User Networks (Lococitato.com)

I recently ran across a very nice little tool for visualizing the connections between a YouTube user, his or her subscribers and his or her "friends". The tool, called YT Visualizer, is in beta but has worked very well since I started using it yesterday.

A trial version of the software is available for download from Loco Citato, the website of XMT Partners, a UK software design firm. (Note: I scanned the software for viruses and spyware/malware with two separate programs and found nothing but, as with all software you download, you do so at your own risk).

To get it to work (after you have downloaded and installed the software), all you have to do is enter the user name of someone who has uploaded a video to YouTube. For demonstration purposes, I used "almasri002".

Almasri002 has uploaded 323 videos to YouTube, many of which are videos that appear to support Islamic extremism. According to his "channel" on YouTube, he also has 488 subscribers and 567 "friends". Understanding more about this social network could conceivably be valuable in understanding the who, what, when, where, why and how of Islamic extremism on the internet but trying to do so manually, given the size of the network, would seem impossible.

YT Visualizer solves the problem by capturing and graphing all of this data into an easy to understand chart. Talking about it makes less sense that showing how it works so I built a little screencast of the tool in action (using one of my other favorite web-based tools, Screencast-o-matic) below:



I only let YT Visualizer run for a minute or so in this demo and, as a result, only managed to import 30 some odd people into the graph (YouTube gets fussy when you send too many requests too rapidly to their servers).

The full version of the software allows as many as 1000 entities to be imported into the graph (the demo version I have allows only 200). As the graph gets larger though, the software cleverly starts to fade out the less important nodes making the graph readable regardless of the number of nodes.

As you can also see in the demo, YT Visualizer pulls in some of the other data available from YouTube so that, when you mouse over the nodes you can see who they belong to, etc.

For the real social networking geeks, the best feature probably is the ability to download the data behind the visualization into a CSV file so that you can then upload it into other, more powerful programs like ORA, UCINET or Analyst's Notebook. This feature is disabled in the trial version so I was unable to test it out.

XMT has a number of other applications for visualizing data on the net but none of them are quite as polished or as powerful as YT Visualizer.

As cool as this is, I am pretty sure that it would be more useful for business professionals than national security types. I can see it providing some sort of contextual information for the national security intel analyst (though that context is pretty limited when you think about the constraints on the data set). I can also see it providing useful leads of the "I gotta start somewhere, so I might as well start here" variety.

Business/competitive intel analysts, however, might really be able to use this tool to identify influence hubs (at least on YouTube) of supporters and detractors of their products.

The potential is also there, of course, for speculative leaps far beyond the scope of the data but the possibilities inherent in the technology far outweigh the risks (for a careful researcher) in my mind.

SCIP Webinar On Evaluating Intelligence (Self-promotion)

I will be conducting a webinar for the Society Of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) on evaluating intelligence on 10 JUN 09 at 1200 EST. I will be going over some of the material in the "evaluating intelligence" series of posts I did earlier this year as well as adding some new stuff that has come along since then.

My goal is to make the material and ideas concerning the evaluation of intelligence a bit more accessible (One of the particular advantages of this format is that it allows for questions during and after the presentation).

I have not done a webinar before so it should be interesting. You can find out more info here: Webinar -- Evaluating Intelligence

(Note: The webinar is not, unfortunately, free. SCIP is a non-profit organization but needs to -- I am assuming -- cover its costs for setting up and running the webinar. I am not charging anything for my time and am getting no compensation for this event.)