Innovation

Motivation

The purpose of the Ingenios innovation program is to design the research framework to support the intelligence analyst. In particular, one of the goals of this program is to generate tools capable to provide new lines of investigation and questions to support investigation and analysis processes.

One of the most important and at the same time most complex tasks of any researcher is to raise new questions. In the context of Intelligence this problem is even more essential and difficult.

In many cases, the intelligence analyst has little or no control over the evidence which feeds the intelligence system. Simply put, while a scientist raises research questions, formulates hypotheses and collects the necessary data to confirm or refute these hypotheses, in the field of intelligence the process is less clear. The working hypotheses of the analyst have an ad hoc character; that is to say that the questions are formulated once the evidence is available.

This poses a significant problem, as the human mind tends to establish patterns based on the available information so as to avoid cognitive discord. In a way, when establishing patterns, there is a risk of forcing the evidence to confirm or refute hypotheses when it is feasible that they are in no way connected , that different questions need to be posed or simply that more data is necessary. In other words, sometimes we see connections between facts, events and data when in reality there are none. Additional data and alternative questions would help to break the propensity to interpret spurious connections as existent.

To a large degree, the Ingenios program contributes to the latter.

Goals

Ingenios represents an effort to design and create a tool that will assist the analyst in searching for new lines of research and posing new questions and hypotheses. In this way the program contributes to breaking the tendency of establishing premature and/or rigid-irreversible patterns.

The aim of the project is to develop a series of procedures and methods strategies of searches and reasoning, which would allow via software based on the concept “put a Sherlock Holmes in a box” support the researchers and analysts in any field of human knowledge.

Projects Derived from the Program Currently Underway

Ingenios considers the design of a deduction engine intergrated into the NowIs systems. The role of said engine improves a fundamental aspect of the intelligence process: the stage immediately prior to the structured data analysis.

On a technical level, the engine consists of the following elements: