Pre-Symposium Science & Technology Forum - Sunday, Oct. 16 (Grand Hyatt San Antonio)

FOR GEOINT 2011, USGIF increased the offerings for the Pre-Symposium track and offered this to attendees at an additional low price.

More information about the PSST Forum that took place at GEOINT 2011, including moderators and speakers, can be found in the agenda.

9 - 9:30 a.m.

Introduction & Keynote
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon A & B
Introduction: Dr. R. Maxwell Baber, Director of Academic Programs, USGIF
Keynote: Dr. Greg Smith, Chief Scientist and Deputy Director, InnoVision, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)

9:40 - 11:30 a.m.

Socio-Cultural Dynamics: An Overview from a Diplomacy, Development, Defense and Intelligence Perspective
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon C
This session brings together leaders from across the diplomacy, development, defense, and intelligence communities to discuss the challenges and opportunities that GEOINT tradecraft is bringing to socio-cultural analysis in the prosecution of whole of government national security goals. The goal of this overview session is to broaden the audience’s awareness far beyond “the human terrain” and to shine a light on the wide range of national security activities that require a spatio-temporally aware understanding of the socio-cultural dynamics that shape security operations, whether they be CT, COIN, FID, SSTRO, HADR or security operations that fall outside of the established Defense Department categories.

Fusion in the information spectrum - Multi-INT analytics as an alternative to “All-Source”
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon D
As processing speed and data storage follow Moore’s Law and evolve away from being limiting factors in information gathering and analysis, the amount of data available to an analyst reaches a point of effective saturation. Efforts to take advantage of multiple observables, automatically fused into information, provide opportunities to replace this saturation with new insight. The key will be creating new concepts both for the merging of the data streams, and intuitive, accessible display of the resulting information. There is room for the entire community to contribute to this process, but especially for academia to provide innovative solutions to both the merge and display efforts. Speakers in this session will address technical and research issues associated with creation and display of fusion applications from government, developer, academic, and commercial perspectives.

The Future of GEOINT Professional Development
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon F
This participatory session explores possible future scenarios for the GEOINT community to appreciate prospective professional development issues through the lens of workers, educators, learners, and administrators. This offers a view to anticipate the future challenges of teaching and learning while generating ideas that might not have arisen from a strictly andragogical and pedagogical perspective. Speakers in this session will provide their vision of the future and a perspective the implications for the tradecraft and the geospatial intelligence professional.

11:45 a.m - 1:15 p.m. Lunch Session

WAS/WAPS/WAMI/FMV: Analysis of Video
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon A & B
Airborne and ground video collections (including collections systems commonly referred to as Wide-Area Surveillance, Wide-Area Persistent Surveillance, Wide-Area Motion Imagery, Full-Motion Video and Immersive Video System) have created a great problem for the intelligence community that inverts the old problem of a lack of data. We now have more video data than we can process and analyze. Turning data into information and subsequently analyzing this information is the focus of this panel discussion. HOW do we analyze all of this data? WHAT do we consider analysis and how much of this analysis can today be automated? During this session we will explore the current state-of-the-art and future trends for analyzing WAS/WAPS/WAMI/FMV/IVS.

1:30 - 3:20 p.m.

Socio-Cultural Dynamics: Lessons Learned
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon C
This session is designed to let implementers of socio-cultural projects across diplomacy, development, defense and intelligence communities, convey the lessons learned about the challenges of geospatially enabling socio-cultural data. Leaders of operationally focused programs and analytically versed practitioners supporting the operators will capture what works, what does not, and where we should be going as a community in the future as Human Terrain confronts Advanced Analytics. This includes lessons from USSOCOM’s Skope Cell, the Human Terrain System, the Culture Map program, USCENTCOM Human Terrain, and other path breaking programs.

Mobile GEOINT Applications
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon D
Mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets have become ubiquitous and are starting to provide powerful new platforms for GEOINT-on-demand. This presents compelling opportunities as well as significant challenges. Speakers in this session will address technical and research issues associated with mobile GEOINT applications from government, developer, academic, and commercial perspectives.

Space-Time Analytics
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon F
Space and time provide the basic analytical framework to make connections among observations and knowledge to aid understanding and improve decision making. From natural processes to human activities, the ability to detect patterns and relationships in space and time holds the key to drawing insights from seemingly chaotic and random occurrences. Expanding beyond transactional and time-step analysis of temporal patterns is necessary to leverage time for advancing spatiotemporal integration. This session includes short presentations on current research in space-time analytics and an interactive panel-led discussion on research needs to address various GeoINT related foci, such as DI2E, new data sources (crowd sourcing), social-cultural applications, and activity-based intelligence.

3:30 - 5:20 p.m.

Socio-Cultural Dynamics: Enabling Technologies
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon C
This session is designed to examine practitioners and technology enablers who are pushing the bounds of Human Socio Cultural technologies, from the social science to the technology, from organizing DoD’s big data to enabling open source technologies to speed the rate of development and understanding of Human Terrain. These panel members are designing and building the Socio Cultural technologies across DoD, and have a unique technical perspective on geospatially- and temporally-enabled technologies being implemented across DoD and the Intelligence Community. These technologists and program managers will discuss what works and how to implement these technologies in the DoD and Intelligence Community.

People and Technology: New Sensing Paradigm for Geospatial
Data Collection and Integration
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon D
Technologies which are easy to use by individuals not trained in geospatial tools and techniques are now prevalent and have opened up new sources of geospatial data. In addition, they have provided new and emerging ways of collecting not only geospatial data but of integrating location with other types of information. Social media, Smart Phones, and other mobile devices are creating new ways in which data and information is being gathered by individuals and is creating opportunities and challenges for the geospatial community in building effective ways of using these new capabilities to help address public purpose needs in a sustained long-term infrastructure.

Big Data – The Engine for Future GEOINT Analytics
Grand Hyatt - Texas Ballroom, Salon F
The technology pioneered by Google earlier this century is starting to impact the way conduct GEOINT analytics. There isn’t an online business with the scale of GEOINT that doesn’t use HADOOP to power its success; companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon rely on Big Data to provide the online experience that leverage massive amounts of data in a way that makes our lives better. We know the technology is powerful, but there are many questions to answer. How do we get started? How is security impacted? How do I interact with other agencies? Who is responsible for managing the data? Our panel will discuss these questions and more, and we invite your input (#GEOINTBigData).