DoAF: Collaboration and Analyst/System Effectiveness (CASE)

On behalf of the Intelligence Community’s Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology (ARDA), the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is soliciting proposals for innovative, creative, and high-risk research to advance the state-of-the-art in technologies and methods for enhancing Collaboration and Analyst/System Effectiveness (CASE).

The Intelligence Community has a central mission to help the nation avoid strategic surprise. By strategic surprise, we mean unanticipated events critical to national security — events that cause national level reactions, such as those of September 11, 2001. Strategic surprises may come in the form of deliberate actions prepared by adversaries of the United States, or they may emerge as unanticipated consequences brought about by the convergence of innocuous technological, economic, demographic, political, or natural forces. In either case, it falls to the Community’s intelligence analysts to spot the indicators of strategic surprise in the ever-growing volume, variety and complexity of data available to them, and to forecast accurately what the surprise might be.

To address this need, CASE takes as its central focus improving the analytic process through advanced technology. The idea is not to eliminate the human expert as the orchestrator and director of analysis, but to surround the human with a variety of powerful yet transparent machine reasoning systems to augment the human’s abilities. These systems could take many forms: capturing and filtering a massive incoming data stream to expose both known and novel patterns; anticipating the information needs of the analyst and executing searches ahead of time, providing the analyst with instant results; detecting biases or missed possibilities in an analysis and offering alternative views of a situation; finding an expert, potentially in a separate agency, on a particular subject area bearing on an analysis; unifying information across text, video, audio, and databases; and many others. In every case the technology should be transparent, meaning that the analyst should not be forced to switch to a separate application in order to get to the desired information, and also that the technology should not unduly separate the analyst from the data.

To fulfill this vision, CASE solicits white papers for research in three areas and in the interrelationships among them:

(1)Modeling the Analytic Process;
(2)Prior and Tacit Knowledge; and
(3)Hypothesis Generation and Tracking.

These three research areas will be applied to three major contextual themes:

(4)Collaboration;
(5)Geospatial Reasoning; and
(6)Data Integration.

In addition, CASE solicits white papers to handle the necessary infrastructure for the overall program in the following areas, and also to lay the foundations for future generations of CASE related research and development:

(7)Architecture/Integration; and
(8)Blue sky research.

Because of the three research areas and the three contexts, the overall scope of CASE can be viewed as a grid:

Research should be conducted in one or more of these cells, and offerors are encouraged to propose research that crosses boundaries between cells. Each successful research effort should result in a detailed study, research paper, and prototype software that demonstrates results.

Amount:
Total funding for this BAA is approximately $49M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY06 - $1M; FY07 - $12M, FY08 ? $12M, FY09 - $12M, and FY10 - $12M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 29 months, with dollar amounts ranging from $250K - $2M per year. 2 12 month options can be proposed (total of 53 months). Multiple areas of research may be addressed.

Deadline:
It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 06 should be submitted by 6 Dec 05; FY 07 by 1 Oct 06; FY 08 by 1 Oct 07; FY09 by 1 Oct 08; and FY10 by 1 Oct 09.

For further information, visit: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference-Number-BAA-06-02-IFKA/SynopsisP.html