National Security, Intelligence

Homeland security departments are tasked with safeguarding, preemption and response across a vast domain, including counter-terrorism, cyber crime, critical infrastructure and man-influenced disasters. The operational challenges are many:

• Despite possessing some of the most advanced monitoring and investigative technologies, these agencies can still struggle to integrate data from all possible sources in real-time, rapidly derive actionable insights, and efficiently disseminate recommendations. New forms of data, including biometrics and IoT sensors, must be integrated into the process.
• Cross-boundary collaboration needs to occur across multiple federal agencies,  state/province and municipal law enforcement, countries and essential businesses.
• Homeland security departments demand agility in their processes and systems, to adjust quickly to opponents that are constantly trying to exploit gaps.
• All of this needs to occur while transparently adhering to laws and policies that protect data privacy and citizens’ rights.

BlackSwan’s ELEMENT for Public Sector™ serves as a highly customisable Intelligence Insights, Decisioning and Collaboration platform. Leveraging a range of AI and big data capabilities, its comprehensive features address key requirements for today’s intelligence community:

Real-Time, Universal Data Access

Incorporate all your organisation’s data sources seamlessly into a master repository, with rapid data integration that can be managed by business analysts — there’s no need for data warehouse development. ELEMENT can process data at ultra-high volume, handling big data including new input sources such as IoT (the Internet of Things). 

The system maintains a live view of all relevant information consolidated into a single source of truth, by accessing the data “where it lives”. As a result, the platform processes all queries with up-to-the-second values, providing real-time information retrieval and a single source of truth.

The platform combines internal data with thousands of sources and billions of data points of accessible third party information, such as government watch lists, social media (OSINT), and the dark web. This automated information enrichment process magnifies your analysts’ ability to uncover fresh insights.

Ontology-Based Universal Knowledge Catalogue

At the heart of ELEMENT is a knowledge graph that represents all gathered intelligence. Acting as a universal knowledge catalogue, this leading-edge technology delivers a number of critical benefits.

The knowledge graph is based on a domain-specific ontology, which formally defines all entities, relationships, and attribute types used to describe data in that domain. An Intelligence ontology includes “persons of interest”, “meetings”, “incidents”, and “risks”  associated with location, time and attendees… and many thousands of other concepts. 

This universal knowledge catalogue offers dramatic improvements in intelligence discovery; querying; interpretation and comparison; and monitoring and collaboration.

• With ELEMENT, collected information of all kinds is automatically catalogued by topic, entity, and relationships to other parties and subjects. This automatic contextualisation, using AI to interpret datasets and documents (via Natural Language Processing), saves immeasurable data compilation time and creates a nearly infinite range of discoverable insights. 
• For greater precision, ELEMENT applies “entity resolution”, clarifying ambiguous data (such as multiple addresses or name spellings) that correspond to real-world entities, and identifying which version of a data point is likely to be more correct and timely.
• ELEMENT readily responds to “semantic queries”, where an inquiry’s meaning is more important than how the question is framed or how the underlying data is organised. For example, posing a question about “where Person X was at Time T” will evaluate directly- or indirectly-related information about the person that ties them to a location (e.g., a rendezvous, workplace, domicile, surveillance camera match) and a time. An analyst can subsequently probe for associated people at the same gathering point.
• ELEMENT’s knowledge graph is “federated”, meaning that it integrates information from multiple sources and data owners, facilitating cross-team collaboration and seamless consumption and analysis of data in distributed environments.

Leading-Edge, AI-centric Analytics

BlackSwan Technologies has been highlighted by Gartner, the leading technology analyst firm, as an early leader in Composite AI. This term represents the combination of multiple artificial intelligence techniques in order to multiply the insights and impact from analyses.

ELEMENT applies advanced machine learning (ML) and deep learning algorithms to analyse patterns, trends and anomalies in the ingested data. Consequently, the platform extracts significant insights that would be next to impossible for manual reviews to identify. Investigations could be target-oriented — for example, “Where is company C doing business ”; event-centric — for example, “Is someone planning a gathering of dubious purpose?”; or behaviour-centric — e.g., “Which social hate group has increased its traffic in the last week?” The findings from the ML model range from scoring risk probabilities, to identifying multiple parties with similar behaviours, recommending additional data to collect, or generating alerts to one’s staff. Combining ML with the knowledge graph makes the AI insights transparent, so that the staff users can undersand how conclusions were drawn by the model.

ELEMENT’s offers advanced data visualisation that augments the interpretive speed of one’s intelligence team. It allows analysts to view at a glance situational status and trend lines through graphical representations of data, including heatmaps and geo-location superimpositions of data.

Accelerated Action with Enhanced Collaboration 

ELEMENT provides “augmented human intelligence”, framing its AI to enhance analysts’ capabilities. The platform presents insights and recommendations to users in an intuitive manner, highlighting those considerations that affect decision-making right now.

ELEMENT’s knowledge graph technology makes it easy to tag entities, activities or general themes for special system monitoring and alerts, ensuring that interested analysts are notified immediately when information is modified or a finding is disseminated. 

Departments can configure the platform’s workflows to automatically route tasks and cases to the appropriate staff as well as to partner organisations, cutting down concerted reaction time from hours or days to minutes.

The platform’s no/low code design allows the responsible departments to easily customise the application as required with minimal technical involvement, reducing the need for scarce data scientists and engineers.

Unified Information Management

ELEMENT’s security framework, built by a team experienced with world-leading national intelligence systems, ensures world-class access/data security and information governance.  For example, the system can automatically detect shifts in system code and other electronic assets that suggest potential hacking and alert the SecOps team.

ELEMENT provides granular control over data access. The platform records the source of every data point, as well as every data access and transformation. Through configurable source management, analysts can audit the data catalogue and assign trust levels.

To comply with privacy guidelines, the system can evaluate data fields and tag each item with the privacy laws and regulations that govern them. Automated sensitive data discovery can significantly reduce the labor involved in prioritizing data sources for compliance attention, and related reporting strengthens the rigor of data use audits.

In summary, ELEMENT for Public Sector delivers a leading-edge platform, ideal for National Security requirements, that is highly intelligent, efficient, collaborative, flexible and secure. 

BlackSwan Technologies’ ELEMENT™ for Public Sector is a comprehensive, enterprise AI-driven platform that can be customized to support and coordinate multiple government functions, including National Security, local Law Enforcement, and Border Control.