Reviewers Needed For The Visual Analytics Science And Technology (VAST) 2014 Challenge!

The Visual Analytics Community and their member organizations (including the Department of Homeland Security, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency), in coordination with the IEEE, sponsors a visual analytics challenge each year at the IEEE conference for students and researchers.  

In order to judge the output from the participants, the challenge organizers asks for analysts to participate as reviewers of the submissions.  Kris Cook, who is on the contest committee, has asked me to put the word out that the contest needs reviewers for this year’s challenge.  

This is an unpaid, all volunteer effort to assist a non-profit sponsored contest.  Kris’ note to me is reproduced below with additional links.  If you are interested in participating or have any additional questions, please contact her directly.  

For what it is worth, taking a look at the VAST entries is a very interesting and rewarding way to learn what is happening in the world of visual analytics.

Begin text of note:

We invite you to be a reviewer for this year’s IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Challenge.  The VAST Challenge poses interesting problems that contestants solve using visualization-based software tools that support analysis of complex data sets.

We are soliciting reviewers for three mini-challenges and a grand challenge this year. 

• Mini-Challenge 1 challenges participants to identify the current organization of a fictitious terrorist organization and how that organization has changed over time, as well as to characterize the events surrounding the disappearance of multiple people.  Participants will use visual analytics to analyze the specified data.
• Mini-Challenge 2 challenges participants to describe the daily routines of employees of a fictitious company and to identify suspicious behaviors. This task focuses on the analysis of movement and tracking data and is thus primarily a spatiotemporal challenge.
• Mini-Challenge 3 challenges participants to identify a timeline of significant events in a fictitious city and identify important participants, locations, and durations by monitoring real-time data feeds. This task poses a streaming analysis challenge.
• The Grand Challenge asks participants to synthesize the discoveries made across the three mini-challenges to form a high level description of the entire scenario. This task focuses on the identification of who disappeared, who was responsible, and the underlying motivations. Significant information gaps will also be addressed by the participants.

More specific information about the tasks may be found at http://vacommunity.org/VASTChallenge2014.

As a reviewer you will be responsible for reading 3-4 submissions and providing written feedback for the committee and the submitters. Each submission consists of an entry form describing the submitter’s software, their technical approach, and their answers to the mini-challenge questions, as well as a short video showing an example of the analytic processes used by the submitters. 

This year, the reviewing period is as follows:  Entries will be available for review by July 12.  Your reviews will be due by July 28.

All review materials will be accessible over the internet. Reviews will be conducted using the Precision Conference web-based reviewing system. Reviewers will be registered in the Precision Conference system and will submit their reviews using Precision Conference web pages.

If you are interested in reviewing please respond to vast_challenge@ieeevis.org no later than July 1.  Please indicate which mini-challenges you would be most interested in reviewing and how many entries you are willing to review. 

Thank you for your time and consideration!

VAST Challenge Committee

Kris Cook, Georges Grinstein, and Mark Whiting, co-chairs

Visa-free Access: Who Has The Best Passport?

Having to get a visa is a hassle - just ask anyone who has gone through the process.  Likewise, being able to travel into and out of countries without a visa is a real benefit.  Who then, has the "best" passport?  Which country offers its citizens the most possibilities for visa-free travel?  The answers, in the infographic below (from Movehub), are interesting (H/T to Jeremy!):

New Version Of "How To Get A Job In Intelligence" In the Works And I Could Use Some Help...

A few years ago, I published a series of posts called "How To Get A Job In Intelligence".  It was, without a
doubt, one of the most popular series I have ever written.

Well, I am about to put out an updated version of that series as an e-book on Kindle.

I have been working with my research assistant, McKenzie Rowland, for the better part of three months to update the info and improve the advice (more articles, more links, more hints and tips, more inside info) and I am getting close to launch.

But I could use your help.

I am looking for feedback from people who found some use in the original series.  If you read the original series and found it helpful or informative, I would appreciate it if you would drop me a line:  kwheaton at mercyhurst dot edu.  I would like to talk to you about what worked for you and what did not.  

Thanks!

The Game Every Intel Professional Should Play Is Now Online And Free!

About a year ago, I wrote about one of my favorite games, the old Viking game of Hnefatafl.  I said then I thought it was a game every intel professional should play.

Since then I created an launched an updated tabletop version of the game through Kickstarter called Cthulhu vs the Vikings and a few months ago announced a very rough online version of the game.

Today, the high quality version is available for free on my website, SourcesandMethodsGames.com!

The game is an asymmetric, player vs. player game.  For those of you unfamiliar with gamer-speak, this means that, like games such as Words With Friends, you are playing a real person and not the computer.  It also means that you do not have to sit at the terminal waiting - you can play a few moves, walk away and come back and finish it later.  You can even have up to 5 games going at the same time!

Another unique feature of this games is that you can either play against people you have invited or you can choose the "Quickplay" option which will match you against the next player to come to the game and choose quickplay as well.

It's a great opportunity to play a great game!  Hope you enjoy it!

Thinking in Parallel (Part Three - Testing The Mercyhurst Model Against The Real World)

Part 1 -- Introduction
Part 2 -- The Mercyhurst Model

For the last 11 years, I have been using the model described in Part 2 to structure my Strategic Intelligence class at Mercyhurst University.  This is a capstone class for seniors and 2nd year graduate students within the Intelligence Studies program at Mercyhurst.  This class is centered on a real world project for a real-world decisionmaker, often within the US National Security Community.  To date, I have overseen 133 of these types of projects.

The broad parameters of the projects have remain unchanged since 2003.  Students in the class are divided into teams and are assigned by the instructor to one of 4-5 projects available during that term.  Each project is sponsored by a national security, business, or law enforcement organization that has a strategic intelligence question.  To date, sponsors of these questions have included organizations such as the National Geospatial-intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Intelligence Council, the National Security Agency, 66th Military Intelligence Group, and the Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service to name just a few.  To give readers a sense of the wide variety of questions intelligence studies students are expected to answer in this course, I have listed a few recent examples of them below:

1. What role will non-state actors (NSAs) play and what impact will NSAs have in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next five years?o What is the likely importance of NSAs vs. State Actors, Supra-State Actors and other relevant categories of actors in sub Saharan Africa?o What are the roles of these actors in key countries, such as Niger?o Are there geographic, cultural, economic or other patterns of activity along which the roles of these actors are either very different or strikingly similar?o What analytical processes and methodologies were applied to the questions above and which proved to be effective or ineffective? 

2. What are the most important and most likely impacts on, and threats to, US national interests (including but not limited to political, military, economic and social interests) resulting from infectious and chronic human disease originating outside the US over the next 10-15 years?  

3. What are the likely trends in Brazil’s oil/liquid fuel market and electric power sector in the next ten years?  Where will these trends likely manifest themselves?o What energy capacity and security issues are likely to be the most significant to Brazil’s economy in the next ten years?o How will Brazil likely address current and/or future energy security issues over the next ten years?o Where will Brazil address these energy shortfalls?

In each case, students had only 10 weeks to conduct the research, write the analysis and present the final product to the decisionmaker.  The students had no additional financial resources available to them and, other than the question itself, received no support directly from the decisionmaker.  Students rarely had any subject matter expertise in the area under question and were only allowed to use open sources.  Students were expected to integrate lessons learned from all previous intelligence studies classes and to manage all aspects of the project without significant supervision.  Finally, all the students, in addition to this project, were taking a full academic load at the same time.  

After all of the deliverables had been produced and disseminated, the decisionmakers sponsoring the projects were asked to provide objective feedback directly to the course instructor.  This feedback, in turn, was evaluated on a five point scale correlated with traditional grading practices and professional expectations.  In short, a 3 on this scale is roughly equivalent to a "B" and a “4” on this scale is roughly equal to “A” work in a university setting.  A “5”, on the other hand, is the kind of work that would be expected from a working (albeit junior) intelligence professional.  The chart below indicates how the annual averages have changed over time.

(Note:   While this chart may appear to reflect grade inflation more than any other suggested effect, it should be noted that “A” is essentially “average” among Mercyhurst University Intelligence Studies seniors and 2nd Year graduate students and has been for the entire time frame shown above.  The current dropout rate from the program is approximately 50% and much of that is due to a strict 3.0 minimum GPA in order to stay in the program.  As a result, seniors and second year graduate students (the only students allowed to take the class), typically have GPAs that average 3.6 or above.  For example, two years ago, 18 of the top 20 GPA’s in the entire University belonged to Intelligence Studies students.)

Anecdotally, it is possible to state the exact impact of these reports within national security agencies in only a few cases.  For example, the report that answered the question on global health mentioned earlier earned this praise from the National Intelligence Council: 

“Although the Mercyhurst "NIE" should not be construed as an official U.S. government publication, we consider this product an invaluable contribution to the NIC's global disease project: not only in terms of content, but also for the insights it provides into methodological approaches. The Mercyhurst experience was also an important lesson in how wikis can be successfully deployed to facilitate such a multifaceted and participatory research project.”

Likewise, in David Moore’s book Sensemaking:  A Structure for an Intelligence Revolution (published by the National Defense Intelligence College in 2011), the study on non-state actors in sub-Saharan actors produced in answer to the question mentioned above was judged more rigorous than a similar study conducted by the National Intelligence Council (in cooperation with the Eurasia Group).

Beyond the national security community, however, the impact of these reports on various businesses and other organizations is often easier to determine.  For example, senior managers at Composiflex, a mid-sized composites manufacturer, indicated, “We used this project as a seed for our new marketing plan in 2007 and now an industry that we had not even tapped before is 30% of our business.” 

Likewise, Joel Deuterman, the CEO of Velocity.net, an Internet Service Provider, stated, “The analysts discovered that our approach was actually a cutting-edge, developing standard in our industry…What really substantiated the data for us was to see many of our existing customers on the list. Then we knew we could rely on the validity of the ones they had found for us.”  

Even foreign organizations have seen the benefit of these products including Ben Rawlence, the Advisor for Foreign Affairs and Defense in the Whip’s Office of the Liberal Democrat Party in the UK, stating, “The research carried out by your students was first class, and has been of substantial use to Members of Parliament…  It was comprehensive, well sourced and intelligently put together.  I have had no hesitation recommending it to our MPs and Lords in the same way that I recommend briefings provided for us by professional research organisations…” 

While it is possible to imagine more rigorous testing of this model of the intelligence process, the long term success of the process in generating actionable intelligence for a wide variety of customers on a range of difficult problems in a very short time using limited resources is hard to ignore.  More importantly, not only has the process proven itself successful but this success has trended upwards as improvements have been made over the years in terms of structuring the course and teaching material consistent with this approach to the intelligence process.

*****

Intelligence in the 21st century is best thought of as a series of sub-processes operating interactively and in parallel.  

This conclusion, by itself, has significant implications for the training and education of intelligence professionals.  In the first place, it suggests that it is no longer possible to specialize in one area to the exclusion of another.  Intelligence professionals will have to be trained to think more broadly, to be able to jump more fluidly from modeling to collection to analysis to production and back as the process of creating intelligence moves forward over time.  

Likewise, hardware and software support systems will need to be designed that facilitate this leaping back and forth between the various sub-processes.  Designing products that work sequentially in a parallel world will not only frustrate but will also slow down the process of generating intelligence – a result that is absolutely counter to the intelligence needs of modern decisionmakers.  

Finally, as dramatic as this type of change might appear to be, it is, perhaps, better thought of as merely aligning the training and education of intelligence professionals with what it is they already do.