So I started thinking about all of the cool work that we are doing here at DAC. I started thinking about ways that I can take this revenue goal and translate into specific actions that will get our superb staff pumped up and excited. We have quite a few interesting products, projects, and technologies in our company so as I was driving home from the meeting I started asking myself “What goal could we put in the ground for each product, project, or technology we have over the next year that would really knock people back on their heels? What would be so impressive that others would just be completely bewildered that we can do something so impressive?”

I got home and started writing ideas down. Here is the initial list:

• To store and index UAV video in a way that makes it searchable based on observed activities.
• The ability to identify objects in UAV video and automatically understand their behavior.
• The ability to identify and predict a terrorist attack in the maritime domain.
• A revolutionary way to visualize relationships between entities and events that separates us from the traditional “entity-network view”.
• To predict an event (or some suspicious activities) based on the input of vast amounts of structured and unstructured data.
• To predict a cyber attack is about to occur against the DAC network.

As I said, this is just the initial list. I have challenged the staff to come up with their own ideas of a great demonstration over the next year. Over the next two weeks we should flush out these ideas, assign “owners” to the challenges and press forward. Those ideas without owners will be dropped from the list. The plan is to demo these capabilities on real data at our next annual meeting in the March timeframe of next year.

As we refine the list over the next few weeks I will post it and you can watch us make progress.

1. Analytical Products Division -  APD is headed by Jessica and is responsible for our BOBCAT product suite.   BOBCAT is an analytical tool that provides guided prediction through large amounts of unstructured text.  By guided prediction, I mean BOBCAT enables you to navigate your way through large amounts of unstructured data (really anything that can be represented as text) based on automatically discovered themes and relationships.  More info on BOBCAT can be found over at the product website http://www.dac.us/products/bobcat/. BOBCAT is largely being applied to the counterterrorism problem, being used to identify suspicious activities and relationships between terrorists identified in text.
   
   
2. Video &  Imaging Division- VID is headed by Tim and is responsible for our Mainship product suite.  Mainship is a Media Asset Management (MAM) system which collects, indexes, and stores video assets including open source intelligence and broadcast news.  Mainship can work in virtually any language and supports many media types. Mainship is being used today in some of the largest government locations to monitor open source news and provide analysts access to open source situational awareness.
   
   
3. Technology Innovation Division- TID is headed by Mike. He is charged with working on difficult data fusion techniques that feed our two products, as well as identifying new areas where we can apply the mathematical techniques we have developed. Mikes current areas of interest include maritime domain awareness, cyber security, entity disambiguation, and CBRN data fusion among others.
   
   
   

I thought it might be nice to give a simple overview of the organization that will be contributing to this blog. We plan to use this blog, our twitter accounts, and our website to interact publicly with our customers and partners. We will be opening this blog up to many more on the staff to contribute. I look forward to the discussion that will follow.