Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS) Tool

Despite advances in collection technologies, US forces still rely on dangerous, close-range Soldier reporting to help identify threats. Similarly, advances in fusion technologies have not supplanted the need for human analysis of data to formulate actionable intelligence. To address these issues, we designed and demonstrated Adversary Behavior Acquisition, Collection, Understanding, and Summarization (ABACUS) services to proactively uncover hostile adversary intent by exploiting multiple sources of existing intelligence (e.g., COMINT, HUMINT). Under Phase I, we demonstrated the feasibility of ABACUS by integrating in-house software and representative data. Our successful Phase I effort provides the basis for a Phase II effort focused on designing, developing, and evaluating the three components of ABACUS: (1) a plug-and-play data processing architecture that ingests the output of text analytics tools operating on multi-source intelligence and provides a common semantic representation to aggregate information across multiple dimensions; (2) an inference engine that uses models of human behavior to compute intent-based threat assessments of individuals and groups; and, (3) a tool that integrates these capabilities into existing and evolving DoD systems (e.g., DCGS-A) for Army intelligence analysts. Phase II will focus on maturation and transition of cloud-based ABACUS technology via early and frequent engagement with the I2WD TCIL.