Data Analytics and Decision Support
Aghveran, Armenia, 1-5 June, 2015
Objectives > NATO ARW
This NATO ARW will serve two main purposes:
(1) to ascertain problems and explore technological solutions using data analytics and decision support (DA-DS) to meet emerging security challenges in three of the NATO priority areas of common interest with Partners countries, namely:
1. Counter-Terrorism,
2. Cyber Defence, and
3. Border and Port Security
(2) to facilitate contact between the specialists in advanced research centres of NATO and Partner countries, specifically Armenia and other former Soviet republics.
In this ARW we will put the emphasis on DA-DS technologies as enablers for addressing security challenges in above three NATO priority areas, all of which are managed through Cyber Physical Social Systems (CPSS) that consist of inhomogeneous, interacting adaptive agents capable of learning: large numbers of groups of people hyperlinked by information channels and interacting with computer systems, and which themselves interact with a variety of physical systems in order to maintain them under conditions of good control.
This ARW will help:
- Exchange the existing knowledge on BD-DS as applied to Counter-Terrorism, Cyber Defence, Border and Port Security as well as build networks among scientists from NATO and its Partner countries that helps to advance the state of the art in these domains.
- Understand the impact on defence and security community of search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft that have created an entirely new business by capturing the information freely available on the World Wide Web and making that useful to people including of course the defence community.
- Explore approached to cope with the fact that these companies collect trillions of bytes of data every day and continually add new services such as satellite images, driving directions, and image retrieval. The societal benefits of these services are immeasurable, having transformed how people find and make use of information on a daily basis.
- Understand the nature of the information and its processing available as a result of advances in digital sensors (telescopes, video cameras, MRI machines, chemical and biological sensors), communications (internet, computer and sensor networks), computation (cloud, cluster, intelligent data analysis, machine learning), and storage (magnetic disk technology) have created huge collections of data, capturing information of value to business, science, government, and society.
- Explore solutions to address security threat. Just as search engines have transformed how we access information, other forms of big data computing can and will transform the activities of companies, scientific researchers, medical practitioners, and our nation's defense and intelligence operations. 'Finding and evaluating possible threats from this data requires “connecting the dots” between multiple sources, e.g., to automatically match the voice in an intercepted cell phone call with one in a video posted on a terrorist website.' (recent US international alert)