Information Salience

An intelligence analyst"s job is to monitor a stream of incoming reports and sensor data for information relevant to a situation, detect the salient information, answer the commander"s priority intelligence requirements (PIRs) and distill the salient information into a concise estimate of what is currently going on, what is most likely to happen, and what is the most dangerous course of events that could happen next. The question we will be pursuing is the extent to which the detection of salient information can be captured algorithmically, so that computerized systems can augment and assist the analyst in capturing salient information. VIStology and Northeastern University"s goal in this project is to examine the context, activity and artifacts involved in the intelligence analyst"s task and to explore how they might be used to model the excitation of a conceptual network that can be used to derive a measure of information salience for incoming reports. We will then validate this model experimentally.