NGA awards first contract for BAA to boost innovative GEOINT

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency announced on July 13 that it awarded a contract to evaluate the success of its geospatial intelligence (or GEOINT) to its users. The contract is part of an effort to enhance NGA’s ability to effectively meet current and future customer demands.

NGA awarded Commonwealth Computer Research, Inc. (CCRi), a $499,767 contract to research current GEOINT user communities and methods to enable data analytics to improve customer support. The contract runs July 5, 2016 to April 2017.

“The future of our environment includes addressing customer needs and knowledge gaps,” said Kim Fite, deputy director of NGA’s Source. “Through this research opportunity, we want to create an environment where the impact of GEOINT data is well understood by NGA through the seamless capture of user feedback and information.”

NGA published the ‘Boosting Innovative GEOINT’ Broad Agency Announcement (BIG BAA) to seek input from industry and academia in measuring the value of GEOINT content delivered to diverse customers in a cloud environment.

The first topic of the BIG BAA was “Value” and focused on maximizing, for the customer, the value of sourced data rather than relying largely on volume-based collection. The BAA will be open for 3 years. Periodically NGA will post new topics on FedBizOpps.gov as a way to seek creative solutions to GEOINT challenges. Two new topic areas were recently released. Topic Area 2 is ‘Artificial Intelligence Automation.’ Topic Area 3 is classified and titled ‘Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Image Formation.’

CCRi is using machine learning and neural networks to identify GEOINT user communities and characteristics of GEOINT data that contribute most to the success of each user community. A dashboard will allow NGA to see what is of value to its customers, as well as steer users to specific GEOINT data that has the highest likelihood of providing value to the user.

Source: NGA