Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
Another example is we've been working closely with the military on a number of fronts. I have personally been out to Iraq, to the front three times since I've taken this job, and I work closely with the people fighting the war on terror there. They gave us a top priority with respect to the targeting of insurgents in the way that I'm just talking about.
Is it something like a cop eyeing a drunk driver who's going too slow?
I've got to be careful here in what I say, because we certainly don't want to tip our hand. You know, we were criticized for not having an imagination. And we took that seriously. In a sense with this technology, we're talking about how terrorists tend to behave in certain ways. Oh, by the way, they keep changing their behavior. They're very adaptive. So, anything that you learn today isn't necessarily relevant tomorrow.
Your colleagues have told us about Argus–this new program you have for detecting disease outbreaks. Can you tell us more about it?
Yes, it came out of ITIC. It started a few years ago. Argus is an example of one of these things that we looked around for, cool things that answered the big problems that we had identified "Day 1." We spent a lot of energy getting them more money, getting them hooked up with customers, accelerating. And through our efforts, we were able to go from a small part of the world that it was aimed at to the entire world in just four months.
How does it work?
What we do is train the computer to harvest open-source material, unclassified material. It looks at the statistics of what is normal in a particular dimension, in this case references to disease and the things that disease cause in societies, that cause social disruption. When there is a change in that rate for that particular type of information, the computer takes note of it. We have been very successful with this technology in predicting well ahead of when the World Health Organization knows about things. We know that something has happened before it's reported in the public press. NIH [National Institutes of Health], in fact, makes great use of this information.
When we found it, Argus was a program in ITIC that had been going on for a number of years on biodefense and warning against biothreats. Bio is a very tough problem and by bio, I mean not only biowarfare but also nature. In a sense, nature is conspiring to get us, too, with things like SARS and avian flu, and at the end of the day our job it to keep America safe, whether the threat is nature or a human being.
So, the leaders of this R&D effort had a central insight about the Worldwide Web and the explosion of media–that the global information network is, in a sense, the world's EKG. People through blogs, through websites, through electronic newspapers, through magazines that find their way onto electronic media and digital libraries–all open source–information flows from the world into this electronic information gathering and then it is distributed back out again. We now have a nervous system for the globe, and it's called "the global information network." Essentially, their insight was to go out there on this nervous system and see what it's telling them about what's happening in the world.
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