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Intelligence, Homeland Security and Databases
In the 21st century, the key to fighting terrorism is information.
Michael Wynne, principal deputy under secretary of Defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics.
Counterterrorism and intelligence tasks rely the
efficient collection, analysis and dissemination of
information. While information systems play a key role in such
tasks, databases are ill-suited to support certain needs of the
intelligence analyst, who many times needs to browse and explore
the data in an interactive fashion, or to detect changes in a
given situation, or to detect patterns of suspicious activities.
Unfortunately, databases are not up to the task. Query
languages like SQL were designed to be efficiently processed and
focused on the query-answer paradigm. Databases fall short on
vital areas, like supporting interactive access to data,
browsing, exploring what-if scenarios, monitoring ongoing
situations and integrating structured, semistructured and unstructured
data sources. Our projects focus on adding such capabilities to
databases.
Research Papers
- Extracting Temporal and Location Information
from Text has been accepted as a poster in ISI 2007. This is the full
paper version.
- Personal Information Management (PIM) for
Intelligence Tasks, in Proceedings of ISI 2006.
- (with Dr. Mehmet Kantardzic)
Link Analysis Tool for Intelligence and Counterterrorism, in
ISI 2005.
- Knowledge Management in Intelligence
Work, in the Encyclopedia of Knowledge Management,
David G. Schwartz, editor, Idea Publishing, Spring 2005.
- Since query languages like SQL are geared towards
one-query-at-a-time exchanges, it is difficult to establish
dialogs with a database. In this paper we describe the initial
phase of a project that focuses on designing and building a
system to support interactive exchanges of information with a
database, including the ability to refer to old results for new
questions, and to play what-if scenarios. The papers appears in
Proceedings of the Second Intelligence and Security Conference
(ISI 2004) ,
Springer
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
- Monitoring of complex situations in SQL is difficult. The
obvious tool for the job, triggers, is not a good solution since
triggers are very limited on the events that they can
monitor. In this paper, we propose a system with semantic
triggers in order to monitor changes in complex events. The paper
appears in
Proceedings of the First Intelligence and Security
Conference (ISI 2003),
Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2665.
- We are currently starting a project on Incorporating
Documents into Databases. A great deal of information in the
real world is outside databases, in emails, memos,
manuals,... By integrating this unstructured information with
the structured information inside the database, the quality of
analysis is expected to improve considerably. Our approach is to go
beyond Information Retrieval (IR) methods and use Information Extraction (IE)
techniques in a controlled manner -guided by the database contents. An initial
draft of our approach will appear as: Text warehousing: Present and
Future, in J. Darmont & O. Boussaid (Eds.), Processing and managing
complex data for decision support (pp. 96-121). Hershey, PA: Idea
Group Publishing, 2006.
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Activities
- We attended the fourth symposium on Intelligence and Security
Informatics (ISI 2006) in San Diego, CA, in May 2006. More information
can be found
here.
- We attended the third Symposium on Intelligence and Security
Informatics (ISI 2005) in Atlanta, GA, in May 2005. More information
can be found
here .
- We attended the second Symposium on Intelligence and Security
Informatics (ISI-2004) that was held in June 2004 in Tucson,
Arizona (information regarding ISI-2004 can be found
here).
ISI-2004 is part of the ACM/IEEE Joint
Conference on Digital Libraries 2004 (JCDL) workshop series.
- We attended the first Symposium on Intelligence and Security
Informatics (ISI-2003) that was held in June 2003 in Tucson,
Arizona (information regarding ISI-2003 can be found
here). The
conference was (extremely well) organized by Dr. Hsinchun Chen and his
colleagues at the MIS
department, Eller School
of Business, University of Arizona.
Links
The number (and hopefully quality) of our links has grown considerably, so
we have now a separate link page.
Contact
abadia@louisville.edu
J. B. Speed 112
Computer Engineering and Computer Science department
Speed School of Engineering
University of Louisville
Louisville KY 40292
Phone: (502) 485-9688
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