Data in the Wild

Customer: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

User: United States Military

Description:

Military forces operating from Forward Operating Bases currently have inadequate means to collect and organize information in ways that can aid in rapid understanding of the evolving population and conditions in an area. For example, Civil Affairs military units conduct reconstruction and humanitarian assistance projects and need up-to-date information on the population’s key grievances including safety, the conditions of the water, sewage, foods and medicine availability, and the presence of NGOs conducting other humanitarian assistance missions in the area. This information is available in a variety of formats, disparate spreadsheets and summarized in text reports that circulate in the field as e-mail attachments. These formats are easy to produce in the field but the information they contain is hard to exploit when it comes time to find quick answers to operational questions.

The goal of this effort is to develop an effective tactical solution to allow non-technical users to collate temporal, geospatial and non-standard data sets from multiple information sources and in particular from video streams in the field without the assistance of specialized IT personnel.