A Visual Analytic for Improving Human Terrain Understanding
Abstract
Visual analytics are a growing area of research within the Department of Defense that targets the effective interleaving of analytical reasoning with interactive interfaces. Capitalizing on the human capacity for spatial reasoning, visual analytics enhance the decision maker's understanding of the underlying decision space by augmenting the assimilation of complex relationships. Towards this end, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory has developed a software application that complements traditional social network analysis and allows for improved understanding of the human terrain. The software application, called the Heterogeneous Data Proximity Tool (HDPT), combines a data dimensionality reduction routine with multidimensional scaling to produce an analytic to visually interrogate the similarity or dissimilarity among a given set of high-valued individuals. The HDPT starts with a reference data set representing individuals with known group affiliations: insurgents, innocents, and criminals. As intelligence is collected about new individuals within an area of operation, HDPT computes and plots their relative positions with regard to the existing reference data. The resulting analytic portrays the relative position of the new individual's organizational orientation within the known human terrain. This paper presents the development of HDPT and the results from its participation in the FY12 Product Director Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (C4ISR) & Network Modernization's Event 2012 (E12) field exercise.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2013
- Accession Number
- ADA586598
Entities
People
- Eric Heilman
- John Richardson
- Mark Mittrick
- Timothy Hanratty
Organizations
- United States Army Research Laboratory