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Technology Services
There are many pieces of the Strategic Insight™ puzzle
from a technology perspective. In particular, our relevant
areas of technical expertise include:
Click on the technical areas above
for a brief overview of our capabilities. For more information,
contact us at 443.545.3100 or at
info (at) nextcentury (dot) com.
Data Presentation and Visualization
In his memoirs, President Harry Truman reflected on the reorganization of U.S. intelligence: “The war taught us this lesson – that we had to collect intelligence in a manner that would make the information available where it was needed and when it was needed, in an intelligent and understandable form. If it is not intelligent and understandable, it is useless.”
At Next Century, our mantra related to user interfaces is “at-a-glance”. For many of our applications, end users need answers now and do not have the time to navigate through a hierarchical menu of commands to get to time-sensitive information. We work closely with these end users to identify the information that is most critical to them in performing their job or mission, and then prototype interfaces with innovative methods for presenting that information in a highly intuitive and rapidly actionable fashion.
Mobile Computing
The world is in the midst of a technology revolution resulting from the explosive proliferation of mobile devices and wireless networks around the globe. This revolution is enabling organizations across all industries and domains to rethink and improve their strategic plans, objectives, and tactical ways of doing business. Yet the rapid and concurrent development of these capabilities has created a daunting and complex quagmire of devices, networks, protocols, and markup languages.
At Next Century, we understand these challenges sufficiently to sort through today's morass of handheld and wireless capabilities and deliver solid mobile solutions to our customers. From the rapid synchronization of data between mobile devices and enterprise databases, to the effective delivery of web content to any handheld device or PDA, members of Next Century's technical staff have played key roles in the development of leading edge mobile computing solutions.
Whether your organization is looking to build a new mobile computing solution, or looking to integrate the use of handheld and wireless technologies with existing systems, we at Next Century have the requisite expertise to build a scalable, reliable, and flexible solution that will provide your organization and you with a distinct competitive advantage for years to come.
GIS and Mapping
The widespread proliferation of mobile computing and other GPS-enabled devices has spearheaded a revolution in which our society has begun to tap into the enormous power of location-based services. Whether for battlefield planning, transportation and logistics, supply chain management, or telecommunications, businesses and individuals throughout the world are beginning to appreciate the tremendous advantages of presenting and managing information in a spatial context. This concept has even begun to extend beyond traditional Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to incorporate other spatial domains as diverse as applications that navigate within individual building floor plans to those that extend and apply the concepts of spatial visualization to applications requiring navigation within the human body.
At Next Century, spatial visualization and mapping are central to our approach to designing and implementing Strategic Insight™ solutions. We possess extensive expertise in the rapid, efficient processing, integration, presentation, and dissemination of spatially enabled information. Our partnerships with leading GIS software vendors enable us to apply the right tools to the right solutions, maximizing performance and capability for a wide array of applications, configurations, and deployments.
Realtime
Data Acquisition
Getting the right information to the right people at the right time requires the ability to acquire that information from the right sources in realtime. Next Century professionals have significant experience in the rapid and effective acquisition of data from a variety of realtime data sources such as:
- Realtime telemetry feeds and GPS devices
- Imaging sensors, whether ground-, air-, or
space-based
- Line scanners (IR, multispectral, and hyperspectral
sensors)
- Video cameras
- SIGINT (signals intelligence) receivers
- Internet sources
- Legacy systems
One of the greatest challenges in data acquisition
is effectively managing the tremendous volume of data being
acquired in realtime, especially from sources such as hyperspectral
sensors. One of Next Century’s greatest technical strengths
is in architecting and implementing high-performance solutions
that successfully address this challenge.
Image Processing
The Next Century team has extensive image processing
and exploitation expertise extending as far back as the Landsat
program in the late 1970s. Key members of our team have architected
and implemented comprehensive image processing solutions for
a wide variety of defense, intelligence, medical, environmental,
and law enforcement applications.
Our team is particularly skilled in
the areas of:
- Rapid, interactive enhancement and manipulation
of extremely large images, including effective compression
and transmission techniques to support remote image exploitation
- Innovative techniques for the processing,
manipulation, and presentation of multispectral and hyperspectral
data sets
- High-performance image import, reprojection,
and export capabilities
- Effective integration of a wide array of
image capture devices for still imagery and motion video
High performance image processing and exploitation
tools developed by our team include:
- OpenELT™,
a high performance image exploitation toolkit which has
been used and deployed in fielded systems across the world
- WIRES™ (Web Image Retrieval and Exploitation System) for rapid
remote exploitation of large images via the Internet or
SIPRNet
- QuickLook™ client/server
solution that provides a scrolling display of imagery received
in realtime from an airborne or space-based sensor, with
the server designed to “plug in” to an existing
ground station, process realtime data feeds, and forward
the data to one or more client displays
Signal Processing
With the ever-increasing emphasis on the exploitation of “multi-int data” (i.e. information from multiple intelligence sources), the importance of effectively integrating inputs from a wide array of sensors has become of paramount importance. Toward that end, we at Next Century have focused much of our attention on the effective integration of imagery intelligence (IMINT) and signals intelligence (SIGINT) data in ways that are highly beneficial and insightful for the end user. We combine our extensive background in the image processing domain with the strong signal processing expertise of several of our key partners to effectively achieve this goal.
Data Fusion and Aggregation
Mining, integrating, fusing, and aggregating
relevant information from multiple disparate data sources
is a formidable challenge. At Next Century, we incorporate
our own leading-edge innovations with approaches formulated
by several of our key
partners to effectively achieve this goal. A particularly
innovative and unique aspect of our approach is the ability
to aggregate and de-aggregate data over time, leading to valuable
capabilities such as temporal decluttering. Our extensive
background in developing high-performance implementations
of complex algorithms is especially beneficial in this domain.
Rules-based Algorithm Development
Key to the knowledge engineering phase of our Strategic Insight engagements is the joint discovery and formal specification of the parameters and algorithms to be used in governing the system’s automated decisions, learning, conclusions, and recommendations. We firmly believe that these rules are dynamic in nature and therefore configure our systems to allow our customers to easily update and expand these rules as needed over time. This is also a domain in which we rely heavily upon relevant technologies from key partners for capabilities such as machine learning and fuzzy logic, which are central to our approach.
Predictive Analysis
Thanks to significant advances in computer power, data storage, and networking, we are delivering Strategic Insight ™ systems today that provide accurate situational awareness for the warfighter, first responder, or intelligence analyst. Our goal, however, is far more ambitious. There is great potential for these systems to become predictive. This aspect of Strategic Insight ™ is where signficant life-saving potential lies. By anticipating events before they occur; we can mitigate the impact of, or even prevent, a disaster. Imagine using Strategic Insight ™ to stop a suicide bomber, or evacuate victims before a natural disaster strikes. Possible?
You bet! Here are some examples of our work in this arena so far:
- We are using multiple weather models together ("ensembles") to produce more accurate weather forecasts for mission planning.
- Based on the movement of enemy troops and the geography, we can predict where they will be in the future, or where certain rendezvous may occur and when.
- Based on chemical properties and the weather, we can predict the dispersion of toxic clouds.
This is just the beginning. |
