Achieving Ubiquity: Technologies to Make Intelligence Available Everywhere on Demand

This research proposal is directed at the development of intelligent agent software infrastructure designed to support the near real-time situational awareness information requirements of warfighters anywhere on the globe. Our focus is on the development and ubiquitous delivery of user-focused "actionable intelligence" (as opposed to the dissemination/publication of large volumes of raw ISR data without context) to mobile warfighters (e.g. tactical air control, special operations, airborne) with limited in situ processing and communications capabilities. The envisioned infrastructure will support the dynamic formation of autonomous data/services "discovery" capabilities tailored to specific user's protocol/routing/format needs, and provide the ability to disseminate "information in context" resulting from a dynamic "focus", at the network level, on warfighter-specific time critical activities and requirements. This proposal will establish the feasibility of achieving this net-centric focus in near real-time via a system of autonomous, intelligent software agents driven by user profiles, automated triggers, action rule sets, active ontologies and association logic that serve as intelligent intermediaries between critical information sources, transformational applications (sensor tasking, registration, fusion, etc.) and globally distributed users with a broad spectrum of mobile-class processing and communications equipment (palm/lap tops, avionics mission computers/displays, mobile image transceivers, UHF LPI/LPD digital radios, SATCOM broadcast terminals, etc.).