Northeast Regional Research Center: Information Technology for Enhanced Analysis

The Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) established the Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) to engage the best regional talent to create solutions to some of the most vexing challenges facing analysts today. Central to this new research model is a series of challenge workshops addressed by collaborative teams across industry, academia, and government. Workshops have made novel contributions in the areas of reuse in question answering, temporal question answering, and opinion question answering, reducing variability in information retrieval systems, graphical annotation for temporal markup, scenario based question answering, and cyber indications and warning for the insider threat. This article reports key workshops accomplishment and lessons learned from this new model for research. GRAND CHALLENGE WORKSHOPS In 2001 ARDA established the Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC) to advance scientific solutions to critical Intelligence Community problems. The center aims to tap knowledge of world class researchers from a broad range of commercial, academic, federal/national laboratory, and military resources. A series of six to eight month challenge workshops seek to push the state of the art and address solutions that entail high risk, but promise high pay-off and lead to operational solutions. Grand challenges are daunting problems that represent a current impasse in technical capability, are provocative enough to engage industry and academia, and are underrepresented in responses to government calls for proposals. The NRRC is careful to select clearly stated challenges that are the right problem at the right time and that are feasible for a workshop format. Assessment is possible through clarification of the problem space, demonstrable “success”, measurable progress (often implying available or creatable test and training data sets), and/or showing which solutions do not work. The regional research center works closely with representatives from across the intelligence community to formulate grand challenges. Through both open calls and direct selection, the regional research center identifies and shapes high performance, interdisciplinary teams from all sources. An Executive Committee (EC) of senior academic, industrial, national laboratory, FFRDC, and government experts assesses proposed challenge workshops and helps to shape an optimal team and plan. The EC also assesses mid-term and final results and recommends any follow-up activities. These unique collaborative forums of world-class experts have drawn a number of expert volunteers who have generously contributed their expertise and resources with the knowledge that they would learn about and advance the state of the art and establish partnerships with leading scientists and engineers. The NRRC is focused on using challenge workshops to enhance ARDA thrusts such as information exploitation (question answering, video analysis, geospatial visualization), information assurance, advanced networking, and novel intelligence analysis.