OSINT-WM 2011 Keynote Speakers
1. Gerhard Wagner (Inaugural Speech)
Desktop Text Mining for Open Source Intelligence
The use of the Internet permeates more and more areas of our daily life. People share and use information in forums
and social networks in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. This fantastic medium with global reach, easy access
and fast information propagation is, unfortunately, also often a tool for illegal activities. Especially in areas like
commercial fraud a huge increase of criminal acts can be observed.
To meet these challenges, law enforcement authorities need to build and reinfoce capabilities in the domain of OSINT. Characteristic
of the Internet like the volume of available data, the plurality of languages and the speed of change make it difficult for
public authorities to keep pace.
The OPTIMA group of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) does research in the field of open source information extraction and text mining. As part of this research it develops tools which can be used in operational settings. As part of its mission to provide scientific and technical support to EU policies, these tools are provided to law enforcement authorities in Member States of the European Union.
The first part of the talk will give an overview of our research in information extraction and text mining. Furthermore, our desktop text mining
tool, EMM OSINT Suite, which is in use by law enforcement authorities in Europe, will be presented. Our "lessons learned" with relevance to
the research community will be shared. The second part will discuss the impact of general trends in internet technology and research on our work now and in the future.
Biographical details:
Gerhard Wagner works for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy.
He belongs to the Open Source Text Information Mining and Analysis (OPTIMA) research group. The OPTIMA research group belongs
to the GlobeSec unit of the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC).
Gerhard is responsible for the design and development of the EMM OSINT Suite software which is based on OPTIMA's research results in Text Mining and Information Extraction. By providing this tool to OSINT analysts in law enforcement and public institutions a quick transfer of research results in practical use is achieved. This supports the EU policies to increase the capabilities in the field of OSINT across Europe.
Before joining the European Commission, Gerhard worked as as a IT-consultant in the private industry helping clients embrace distributed systems based on Internet standards. He holds a Master's degree in Informatics (Diplom-Informatiker) from the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
Discovering complex networks of events and relations in News Surveillance
When faced with the need for analyzing vast streams of on-line text data, we require methods that go well beyond keyword-based queries.
Large-scale surveillance of on-line news streams requires an understanding of the text on a deeper level than is afforded by names and keywords alone, it becomes essential to understand complex interactions among the entities relationships and events.
We will discuss the interplay between two aspects of this kind of deep analysis:
a. how to extract knowledge from text "upstream” and
b. how that knowledge may be utilized in downstream applications.
We will use as live examples several systems in different application domains: cross-border crime and security, epidemiological surveillance, and business intelligence.
We will present the experiences from the development of such systems and from interaction with real-world users, who are experts in their respective domains.
Brief Bio
Roman Yangarber obtained his MS and PhD (2000) at New York University (NYU), in Computer Science with concentration on Natural Language Processing. Prior to moving to Helsinki, Finland in 2004, he held the post of Assistant Research Professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, where he specialized in computational linguistics, focusing on machine learning algorithms for acquisition of semantic knowledge from plain text. In particular, the focus is on obtaining knowledge from large news streams. Roman Yangarber has been an organizer, editorial board member, and program committee member for a large number scientific events, conferences, organizations, and journals, and has served on evaluation panels for the US National Science Foundation. He has over 60 publications in international conferences, journals, and book chapters. Since coming to the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, he has held the post of Acting Professor, and at present leads two nationally-funded research projects, and participates in two others (EU- and nationally-funded), in which he supervises MS and PhD students, in text mining and computational linguistics. He is Principal Investigator of the PULS Project: text analysis for surveillance of news media.
Who, What, When, Where and How: Semantics Semantics Helps Connect the Dots
Intelligence analysts must be able to foresee or imagine how one or more evidence streams, often with many missing elements, overlap or may fold into one another to form a complete picture. But the reality is, even really good human analysts cannot juggle more than 50-60 data points—events, names, places, times, dates and all the connections between them—at once.
Good technology that mimics the same approach has no such limitations. Allowing such a system to build the larger picture—to connect the dots—through trial and error, quickly and repeatedly with an analyst reviewing that picture for plausibility, internal consistency and impact, is a more effective approach than adding a small army of new analysts to the problem.
Organizations are increasingly turning to semantic technology to help them manage, integrate and gain intelligence from the multiple streams of unstructured data and information they manage daily. Unlike keyword and statistic/algorithm based technologies, semantic technology is unique in its ability to go beyond the limits of other technologies and approach the automatic understanding of a text. While semantic web, or Web 3.0 technology is quickly eclipsing first-generation, keyword based index search systems and second generation social media interaction, the transition is far from complete. Nowhere is this technology more useful than in the national intelligence space. In this session you will learn:
- How to leverage semantic technology to bring information and intelligence from around the web, inside your operation.
- How semantic technology can improve on your traditional data management methods through better data identification, classification, mapping and evaluation.
- Semantic Web technology can provide a window into how people, places, things and events come together into both threats and opportunities.
- How adding a semantic layer to your existing intelligence platform supports the strategic process of intelligence gathering and data analysis.
- How semantics can help in cyber security and threat detection with semantic-based classification, filtering, data mining, and meta-tagging to expose non-obvious relationships.
Short biography:
Gianluca Sensidoni is the Manager, Intelligence Division of Expert System, the leading semantic software provider. Gianluca is focused on managing partnerships and projects for Homeland Security and Open Source Intelligence where he has directly contributed to successful software implementations for the public administration market and for leading international companies in the oil and energy, automotive and security industries. His experience includes an extensive background in technology management and overseeing quality control and customer satisfaction throughout the project lifecycle.
Prior to his tenure at Expert System, Gianluca was a Technical Project Leader at Siemens Informatica SpA where he led business planning and coordination efforts for strategic consulting and technology projects in the areas of customer relationship management, enterprise application integration, knowledge management, remote device controlling, lawful interception management, and trouble ticket and workforce management. Gianluca holds a Masters in eBusiness from the CEFRIEL (Politecnico di Milano). He also received a Masters from the ISCTI (Comunication Ministry) and holds a degree in Engineering Management from the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
Visualisation for Decision-Makers
Abstract:
How should we communicate the results of our analysis to decision-makers? This talk will argue that visualisations and infographics can play a very important role, not only for analytical processes of data analysts, but also for explaining our analytical esults to decision-makers at the highest of levels. Some care must be taken to avoid various common pitfalls when designing such visuals: the talk will cover bad examples as well as good in order to uncover design guidelines and practical advice for those wishing to pursue a more visual approach.
Biographical Details:
oe Parry has worked on visualization and graphics systems for intelligence work for the last thirteen years.
During that time he has done software development, design, systems architecture and more experimental research projects.
He has worked with the intelligence communities of the UK, US and other countries. His recent professional interests include
social network analysis and web-based visualisation systems. This year he started his own software company which is producing what
he hopes will be part of a new wave of investigation software.