11. Empowering the Next-Generation Analyst

Situation analysis for activities such as crisis management, military situation awareness, homeland security, or environmental monitoring is both enabled and challenged by access to enormous data sets. The advent of new sensing capabilities, advanced computing and tools available via cloud services, intelligent interconnections to mobile devices, and global interconnectivity with ever-increasing bandwidths provide unprecedented access to data and to computing. In addition, emerging digital natives freely share data and collaboration. Thus, on one hand situation analysts have great opportunities to access unprecedented amounts of information from sensors, human observers and online sources to assist in understanding an evolving situation. On the other hand, this access to huge data sources and computing can create a type of intelligence attention-deficit disorder, in which analysts are overwhelmed by the urgent, but lack the ability to focus on important data. This chapter provides a summary of this dilemma, describes a new analysis paradigm that links data-driven and hypothesis driven approaches, introduces a new prototype analyst workbench, and discusses an educational approach to empower the next generation of analyst.