3-D technology may help see buried threats in fuzzy data

Researchers at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate are trying to harness 2-D and 3-D graphics and such other techniques to decipher buried threat clues in fuzzy data, which is often used by terrorists.

Washington, November 15 : Researchers at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate are trying to harness 2-D and 3-D graphics and such other techniques to decipher buried threat clues in fuzzy data, which is often used by terrorists.

Dr. Joseph Kielman, who advises the National Visualization and Analytics Center based at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has revealed that the centres' interdisciplinary researchers are automating how analysts recognize and rate potential threats.

Mathematicians, logicians, and linguists are trying to device ways to assign brightness, colour, texture, and size to billions of known and apparent facts, and to integrate them so that threats could be identified.

If terror is afoot in L.A. and Boston, those cities will be highlighted on a US map.

A month of static views might be animated as a "temporal" movie, where a swelling ridge reveals a growing threat.

"We're not looking for 'meaning,' per se, but for patterns that will let us detect the expected and discover the unexpected," Kielman says.

He has also clarified that neither the researchers nor the analysts need to understand the terrorists' language, for there is a shortage of cleared linguists.

Kielman admits that it will take years before visual analytics can automatically puzzle out clues from fuzzy data like video.

ANI