Sponsors

The Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) in Information Technology was created as a joint activity of the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Department of Defense (DOD) in late November 1998. At this time, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) was directed to establish an organizational unit to carry out the functions of ARDA.

The Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) is an Intelligence Community (IC) center for conducting advanced research and development related to information technology (IT) (information stored, transmitted, or manipulated by electronic means). ARDA sponsors high risk, high payoff research designed to produce new technology to address some of the most important and challenging IT problems faced by the intelligence community. The research is currently organized into five technology thrusts, Information Exploitation, Quantum Information Science, Global Infosystems Access, Novel Intelligence from Massive Data and Advanced Information Assurance.

ARDA's Information Exploitation Thrust

ARDA defines Information Exploitation as the process of extracting, synthesizing, and/or presenting relevant information from vast repositories of raw and structured data. Data includes multiple media and genre types in all the human languages and that also contains geospatial and abstract data. More specifically, Information Exploitation provides the core functionality to access information necessary for an analytic process, especially in the Intelligence Community (IC). At a minimum, Information Exploitation includes: Content Data Transformation, Content Data Mark-up, Information Retrieval, Information Discovery, Analytic Knowledge-Bases, Information Understanding, Assessment and Interpretation, Synthesis and Fusion, and Presentation and Visualization. ARDA's Information Exploitation programs are attempting to significantly advance the state of the art in some of these areas with the expectation that advanced analytic tools will emerge.

ARDA's Information Exploitation programs are focused on:

• Structured and unstructured human language data of all media types, written and spoken in multiple languages, using multiple styles, formats, character sets, etc.;
• Image data to include document images, photographs, and video; and
• Abstract or technical data.

ARDA currently has three active Information Exploitation programs:

1. Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE)
2. Geospatial Intelligence Information Visualization (GI2Vis)
3. Advanced Question and Answer for Intelligence (AQUAINT)

Informedia has two projects under the VACE Program:

VACE Phase I: Informedia Video Information Summarization & Demonstration Testbed

VACE Phse II: ENVIE: Extensible News Video Information Exploitation