Geospatial Abduction: Principles and Practice

Mobility, Data Mining and Privacy, 2008

Geo-spatial Information Science, 2017

For centuries, humans' capacity to capture and depict physical space has played a central role in industrial and societal development. However, the digital revolution and the emergence of networked devices and services accelerate geospatial capture, coordination, and intelligence in unprecedented ways. Underlying the digital transformation of industry and society is the fusion of the physical and digital worlds-'perceptality'-where geospatial perception and reality merge. This paper analyzes the myriad forces that are driving perceptality and the future of geospatial intelligence and presents real-world implications and examples of its industrial application. Applications of sensors, robotics, cameras, machine learning, encryption, cloud computing and other software, and hardware intelligence are converging, enabling new ways for organizations and their equipment to perceive and capture reality. Meanwhile, demands for performance, reliability, and security are pushing compute 'to the edge' where real-time processing and coordination are vital. Big data place new restraints on economics, as pressures abound to actually use these data, both in real-time and for longer term strategic analysis and decision-making. These challenges require orchestration between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) and synchronization of diverse systems, data-sets, devices, environments, workflows, and people.

2010

This paper investigates the root causes of insurgency and exploits a Geographic Information System (GIS) to model the effects of terrain and urban infrastructure on insurgent behavior. It develops a mathematical model that can predict the likelihood of an individual turning into an insurgent based on various contributory factors. Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan has been on the rise, primarily to fight the United States (U.S.)-led coalition forces. Insurgents often seek complex terrain and urban infrastructure to ambush U.S.-led coalition forces which are carrying out military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using examples from Iraq we model spatial and temporal trends in insurgent activities with a GIS, which may help understand the overall insurgency and behavior of insurgents who carry out attacks against U.S-led coalition forces.

ICLP, 2024

The ability to generate artificial human movement patterns while meeting location and time constraints is an important problem in the security community, particularly as it enables the study of the analog problem of detecting such patterns while maintaining privacy. We frame this problem as an instance of abduction guided by a novel parsimony function represented as an aggregate truth value over an annotated logic program. This approach has the added benefit of affording explainability to an analyst user. By showing that any subset of such a program can provide a lower bound on this parsimony requirement, we are able to abduce movement trajectories efficiently through an informed (i.e., A*) search. We describe how our implementation was enhanced with the application of multiple techniques in order to be scaled and integrated with a cloud-based software stack that included bottom-up rule learning, geolocated knowledge graph retrieval/management, and interfaces with government systems for independently conducted government-run tests for which we provide results. We also report on our own experiments showing that we not only provide exact results but also scale to very large scenarios and provide realistic agent trajectories that can go undetected by machine learning anomaly detectors.

Geospatial Reasoning has been an essential aspect of military planning since the invention of cartography. Although maps have always been a focal point for developing Situational Awareness, the dawning era of Network Centric Operations brings the promise of unprecedented battlefield advantage due to improved geospatial situational awareness. Automated Geospatial Tools (AGTs) are ubiquitous within current military forces and also civil and humanitarian organizations. Nevertheless, there is too little empirical evidence to quantify the military value of automated geospatial tools to the warfighter. As research and development efforts progress to bring forth the next generation of AGTs, Advanced Automated Geospatial Tools (AAGT), it is vital to inform the development process with sound empirical assessments of the military value of AAGTs within a Network Centric Environment. To this end, the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) is sponsoring a series of experiments to evaluate the value of its AAGT, the Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awareness -Battle Command (BTRA-BC) Tool. This paper discusses the scope of the current experiment, the hypotheses we intend to investigate, and the experimental design. Results of our first set of experiments will be provided at the conference and in a later version of the paper.

2006

Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) is the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. GEOINT provides critical spatial information to a decision making process that is necessary for meaningful actions and decisions, based on the fusion or integration of multiple forms of data collected from satellite and airborne sensors, along with a wide variety of other digital geographic information. GEOINT supports the first and highest obligation of the governments the protection of the nation’s security. It plays a critical role, informing every aspect of the development and implementation of the nation’s security policy from the national to the tactical level. Based on experience gathered by consortium members in research and development activities related to different GEOINT components, CGINT wants to demonstrate possibility and usefulness of creating a Centre ...

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2009

Background to the ICA Research Agenda Maps and geographic information (GI) have special power through their ability to connect and integrate data sets by their inherent geographic location and to present the information content in a user-friendly and understandable visual and tactile way. Such ability has long been recognized as an intrinsic property of the map artefact, as well as of contemporary geodatabases. The power of maps and geographic data handling has recently been recognized in many real-world applications and strategic decision-making situations related to current topics such as crisis management, developing early-warning systems, supporting sustainability, and decreasing global poverty.