I was on the DARPA web site reading about what they were doing and I came across an up coming event.

“DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office is hosting a Proposers Day meeting to provide information to potential applicants on the structure and objectives of the new Friend or Foe program. Friend or Foe aims to rapidly characterize the phenotype of unfamiliar bacteria to distinguish harmless organisms from potential pathogens”

From WIKIPEDIA – In biology, a pathogen (Greek: πάθος pathos “suffering, passion” and -γενής -genēs “producer of”) or a germ in the oldest and broadest sense is anything that can produce disease; the term came into use in the 1880s.

Again from WIKIPEDIA – In humans, disease is often used more broadly to refer to any condition that causes pain, dysfunction, distress, social problems, or death to the person afflicted, or similar problems for those in contact with the person.

I started to think about some of the work at Biosension.

We focused on monitoring military and law enforcement(LEO) so that they could better understand what their bodies and minds were doing during times of stress.

However, it is evident that there is another side that needs to be understood. In the DARPA study, the importance in understanding the pathogen is brought to the forefront. In our world, a pathogen is the bad person that is a threat to our society.

We started to think more about the shooting in Florida. We read about the FBI being alerted to a threat that turned out to be very real. And we read about the break down in the failure of the FBI to take appropriate action. The alert was manual. The alert came from a single person and a post on YouTube. Access to the post was removed. But there was a break down in process — so states the FBI. The results of the failure are heart breaking. But the failure in the process was predictable. Any time you have a manual process driven by human beings the probability of failure increases.

And a sad fact is that processes are driven by cost and probability of outcome. The FBI and organizations such as the NSA are driven by resource constraints and mission statements. We at Biosension are pretty much free to look at a problem and decide if we think we can provide a solution that makes life a little more secure. The video here illustrates our mission statement.

So – how can we leverage what we already have as a starting point?

1. When SWAT comes through a door, they have an expectation that there will be one or more people on the other side of the door. SWAT understands that they have 10 or so seconds a room and a determination is made. That in itself has value.
2. The FBI does not know that they should go to the post XYZ on YouTube with the expectation that they will view information on a potential criminal. On the positive side, people like to brag. They just can not keep their mouths shut. But just as the case in Florida, the shooter went to social media and posted his intentions. The entire FBI could not allocate 10 or so seconds for each post on YouTube — trying to understand intent. There are approximately 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
3. A common goal that both SAT and the FBI want to reach is to understand intent. The primary differences are the source of information is bouncing around in a chaotic environment for SWAT and the source of information for the FBI is relatively stable — YouTube and SWAT needs the intent from real time streams while the FBI is not bound by such strict time constraints.
4. With SWAT and the military, we are constantly improving our ability to establish intent — does the person have a weapon, is the weapon held by a person, is the weapon a knife, handgun, bomb, etc.
5. With the FBI we have to locate the source of information. There are applications that are based upon web crawling. The application searches the web looking for keywords, images and videos. The trick is that not all relevant videos and images are tagged with the word “killer”. The images, videos and audio streams need to be analyzed for content — establish intent – some like the word sentiment.
6. Our goal is to link what we have — establishing intent by analyzing images, text and audio — item 4 with item 5 — scrapping for relevant sources.

Seems like the right thing to do.

Any comments or questions: troy@biosension.com