By On January 24, the U.S. Air Force released a request for information (RFI) for intelligence-related data and analysis services. Responses are due by 4:30 p.m. Eastern on February 5.
The Intelligence Systems Support Office (ISSO), SAF/OC/CDMR, requires data analysis in support of ISSO projects, including the development of algorithms and visualizations from the data. Visualization will be a dashboard documenting behavior detected in analyzed data based on an ongoing initiative to a specific project use case. The dashboards should allow user input to create analytics use cases.
Database design and optimization is required to accommodate novel use cases. Part of the process of building the dashboards requires the testing and development of innovative methods for interactive mapping of large quantities of data on the order of 2 million points visualized in an interactive, zoomable, pannable map created by Leaflet and deck.gl, utilizing GeoArrow. The dashboards require development of Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes to ingest data based on on-the-fly user-defined requirements.
ISSO requires Machine Learning (ML) analysis to power the dashboards with the following requirements:
- Computing clusters of points within physical proximity of each other. This comparison must be able to be performed on over 1 million points in under 1 minute.
- Perform geographic clustering of identified point centroids to determine clusters. These clusters must be converted into geographic polygons.
- Perform social network clustering of points found to be in close proximity of each other.
- Model, using an ensemble of time series forecasting algorithms, usual activity in an area of interest (AOI) and signal an alert when actual activity deviates outside an acceptable range. The modeling process must take no longer than 5 minutes to calculate.
The data ingestion process for the dashboards requires consuming commercially available data or ingesting from USG-provided Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) on Top Secret (TS) networks. The data must be stored in an open source database with optimizations for geospatial and temporal data.
These algorithms, dashboards and reports will be deployed in containers onto secure networks that support the Defense Intelligence Enterprise. Furthermore, allowing all Department of Defense (DOD) users access, without additional cost to the USG.
ISSO requires the installation of and maintenance of the Posit software suite (Posit Workbench, Posit Connect and Posit Package Manager) to facilitate data science workloads. The software must integrate with Keycloak for user authentication and be installed on Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPR) and Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS).
ISSO requires training for its staff in the R programming language as well as ML and Artificial Intelligence (AI) practices, to encourage automated reporting, rigorous analysis and data-driven decision making. The content should be accompanied by corresponding readings from published books on the subject.
ISSO requires exposing advanced geospatial capabilities, utilizing modern, open source tooling—such as PostGIS, geos, DuckDB Spatial and simple features in R—to end users with no coding ability. This is required to be in the form of a dashboard that allows users to upload Geojson files to be manipulated through a Graphical User Interface (GUI).
ISSO requires assistance automating data manipulation and model training with various classified data sets related to different ongoing projects. The data manipulation would be computed in R and/or SQL and the model training with various methods such as penalized regression, boosted trees, forecasting and other types as needed.
Review the Air Force data and analytics services RFI.
Source: SAM
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