Data-to-Decisions (D2D)

SHORTENING THE CYCLE TIME FROM DATA GATHERING TO DECISIONS

 

CHALLENGE:

Nearly all national defense missions involve Decision Support Systems—systems that aim to decrease the cycle time from the gathering of data to some operational decision. Proliferation of sensors and large data sets are overwhelming analysts, as they lack the tools to efficiently process, store, analyze, and retrieve vast amounts of data.

Current development cycles are drawn out, vertically-integrated, and do not keep pace with changing countermeasures and threats. Technical challenges include diverse data storage methods, including embedded systems, grid clusters, and cloud computing, and the limitations of existing computational, analytic, hardware, and software infrastructures.

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ASD(R&E) FOCUS:

The Department has begun a Data-to-Decisions initiative to develop an open-source architecture system that enables rapid integration of existing and future data exploitation tools to achieve a new paradigm in the management and analysis of data. The initiative is pursing technologies to aid in the development of analytic approaches and advanced user-interface techniques to result in libraries of analytic and user-interaction modules that can be repurposed across a number of joint missions.

Data-to-Decisions will use a proven "build-test-build" process that improves technical components by providing real-world data sets to researchers with oversight from front-line operators. Promising research avenues include:

• enhanced images
• temporal, and text analytics
• better software architectures
• improved algorithms for data fusion
• improved understanding of user interactions

These efforts will reduce latency with higher probability of detections and fewer false alarm rates; increase situational understanding in operational missions and thus support more relevant and informed decisions; and enhance ability to navigate and find important relationships and targets in extremely large data sets.