Instrumenting the Intelligence Analysis Process

The Advanced Research and Development Activity initiated the Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) program to develop advanced analytic technologies and methodologies. In order to support this objective, researchers and developers need to understand what analysts do and how they do it. In the past, this knowledge generally was acquired through subjective feedback from analysts. NIMD established the innovative Glass Box Analysis (GBA) Project to instrument a live intelligence mission and unobtrusively capture and objectively study the analysis process. Instrumenting the analysis process requires tailormade software hooks that grab data from a myriad of disparate application operations and feed into a complex relational database and hierarchical file store to collect, store, retrieve, and distribute analytic data in a manner that maximizes researchers’ understanding. A key to success is determining the correct data to collect and aggregating the low-level data into meaningful analytic events. This paper will examine how the GBA team solved some of these challenges, continues to address others, and supports a growing user community in establishing their own GBA environments and/or studying the data generated by GBA analysts working in the Glass Box.