The DARPA of geospatial

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The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency's University Research Initiatives awards grants to investigate topics related to geospatial intelligence, some of which seem, at first, to be pretty far afield.

NGA's InnoVision Directorate, tasked with 'the focalpoint in NGA to address the future,' oversees the NURIprogram. Ernie Reith, deputy director of the InnoVisionDirectorate, said a lot of basic scientific research needs to bedone to improve geospatial intelligence. For example, the agencylooks to the first project mentioned above ' the oneinvolving mapping Earth's magnetic field ' toeventually help researchers improve the accuracy of GlobalPositioning System devices and control orbits of satellites. Theresearch could also help provide more accurate electronic targetingcapabilities.Some trends can be discerned in the evolution of research topicareas. Previous years were more heavily weighted toward areas ofdata acquisition, for example, while this year's topics leantoward basic research affecting the tracking of objects.

When you think of NURI, think of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency...but only for geospatial projects.


NURI stands for NGA University Research Initiatives. NGA, of
course, is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a combat
support agency at the Defense Department.


The NURI project has been operating since 1997 and has already
awarded 103 grants to researchers at more than 60 universities to
investigate topics related to geospatial intelligence. Each grant
is for three years and generally amounts to $150,000 per year.


This year's awards (GCN.com/1201) range from
one for a research project on 'Spaceborne Magnetic
Gradiometry after Swarm: Novel Approaches to Mapping the
Earth's Magnetic Field Employing Nonlinear Magneto-Optical
Rotation Sensors' to a project titled 'Purpose- Aware
Dynamic Graph Models for Representing and Reasoning about
Networks.'


Seem like a long way from digital mapping? Actually, no:
Geospatial intelligence involves a lot more than mapping. NGA has
distilled its research road map into these six broad topic
areas:



  • Acquire: Including sensor networks, detection of moving
    objects.

  • Identify: Spatiotemporal data mining.

  • Integrate: Image data fusion, reuse and preservation of
    data.

  • Analyze: Visualization, process automation vs. human
    cognition.

  • Disseminate: Multilevel security.

  • Preserve: Grid computing for geospatial data, reuse and
    preservation of data.













A more detailed road map ' which Reith said is not public
' deals with a broad spectrum of specific challenges. They
include finding ways to track criminals or terrorists, detecting
weapons of mass destruction and finding ways of discovering
relevant data in a large database. Reith said the program's
priorities cover a lot of ground, 'from actual intelligence
problems to helping the analyst out to display devices.'


Each year, a panel of senior NGA scientists ranks proposed
topics against the road map and then finalizes a list of specific
topics. Universities then write proposals on those lists of topics
are made with the input of other intelligence agencies.


The four topic areas for 2008 were:



  • The 'geopotential' of gravity and the magnetic
    field.

  • Developing efficient target detection and tracking techniques
    using image data from multiple sources.

  • Research on improving techniques for automatically extracting
    features from remotely sensed imagery by using contextual
    cues.

  • Research to develop analytic tools and techniques that track,
    monitor and predict natural or anthropogenic activities and provide
    estimates of the causes of visual scenes.






As for the future? 'There are challenges out there that I
suspect we're going to see along the lines of data storage
and data discovery,' Reith said. 'Something we hear
back from people in the field is that, with all of the data sources
that are being provided, there's an awful lot of difficulty
finding the data that they need.'



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