Photo by Steve Long, courtesy of Saint Louis University
Courtesy of the NGA
Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, director of the NGA
Vice Admiral Robert Sharp, the new director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, made his first public remarks here, speaking at the April 9 Geo-Resolution conference at Saint Louis University.
Sharp talked about the NGA’s deep roots in St. Louis, beginning with defense mapping for World War II. Today, the agency integrates oceanography, satellite imagery, photo analysis, cultural geography, and human intel. “We produce and deliver trusted geospatial intelligence,” Sharp said, and “we do so by knowing the Earth, the physical science of the earth, its characteristics, and by layering information on top of that understanding.”
The biggest current challenge to that endeavor? Data is exploding even faster than technology, and the sheer volume of data “is going to force us to evolve the way we do our business,” he said, “thinking through how we leverage machines to do what machines do best, so our critical thinkers can focus.”
The NGA already has a research and development agreement with SLU, Sharp said, and it’s hoping to sign similar agreements with Washington University and the University of Missouri–St. Louis, “tapping into great minds.” STEM talent is in high demand in the public sphere, where work in AI and geospatial intelligence will be needed to hold the country together. And because the private sector is a little sexier, there’s an urgent need for outreach and recruitment—starting with science programs for kindergarteners and moving through youth mapping clubs and community mapathons.
At a small press conference after his session, Sharp spoke about the design for the new North St. Louis facility, which deliberately includes unclassified areas where analysts can compare notes with members of academe and industry, talking about emerging technologies and exploring possible applications.
During construction, “would this be primarily a Corps [Army Corps of Engineers] project?” asked a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter. “Do you kind of sit back for a few years?”
Sharp grinned. “I never sit back.”
Another reporter asked if he worried that funds could be diverted for the border wall.
Not now, he said. “We’ve been awarded a contract, and we’ve been through the waiting period where if anyone was going to protest this contract, that’s expired.” The previous week, he’d testified in closed House and Senate sessions, talking about the NGA budget—on the morning after that deadline expired.
Asked about his own trajectory, Sharp said, “This is a dream job for me. I’ve worked around the men and women of this agency at every step of my career. I’ve deployed with their products. I’ve deployed alongside them.” (Half of the NGA’s staff members are in Virginia and 25 percent in St. Louis, but the other 25 percent are dispersed around the globe, present in all combat zones.)
“It’s Embedded Everywhere”
After the sweeping opening, the conference got specific, with experts from academe, industry, and government (partnerships whose necessity was emphasized again and again) talking about mapping from every angle. Geospatial data can be used to find water below a desert; to track the spread of an epidemic; to predict a flood or respond to an earthquake. But with the data itself flooding us, several speakers echoed the need to let machines take over some of the monitoring, freeing analysts to research and interpret. Right now, almost half the NGA analysts' time is spent “knowing the known,” monitoring what’s already been pinpointed rather than discovering an unknown location or spotting an ominous trend. The “computer vision” of AI could someday change that ratio.
Timing's urgent. Steven Ward, senior director of geospatial and weather sciences at The Climate Corporation, noted that by 2050, there will be 3 billion more people on the planet, farming on one-third less land, and population will be concentrated in cities. “Food supply, food security, as we become more urbanized, is going to be critical,” he said. Cities will be hives of information, and “that geospatial data is really a new currency. It’s the connective tissue within a city that ties people together.” (If you think your city’s already well-mapped, he added, “go through something like Hurricane Katrina. We thought we had a good grasp on the city, who was where, what was where. We did not.”)
The data might not always be reliably complete, accurate, and refined, but it is abundant. “It’s embedded everywhere, both the technology and the tradecraft,” said Mark Munsell, the NGA’s chief technology officer. “If you think about what you do with your handheld devices, what you do on the internet—there’s a location aspect to it. And the more technology is put in place, the more this technology grows. Look at the companies trying to harness data. You have to have spatial technology to make sense of this data. And because of that, it’s pushing into areas of technology where it’s never been before. More and more, we are harnessing this global cloud infrastructure to be able to do things with this data that nobody else has ever dreamed of.”
Stacey Dixon is the director of IARPA, which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. In her words, “it’s like DARPA,” the defense research group, “except much smaller and much poorer.” Yet it’s working in the ether of AI, biosecurity, social media data mining, and machine recognition and translation of little-spoken foreign languages. She talked about current projects:
Finder geolocates images, gathering data on remote or troubled spots that carry no metadata and welcome no tourists.
DIVA automatically detects activity in the multicamera, streaming-video environment of today’s surveillance systems. “This was prompted by the Boston Marathon bombing,” she explained. “All the video that had to be hand-combed. We want to be able to do it in advance.”
Core3D creates “operationally realistic 3D environments. “You want to be able to model the area you’re about to enter in real time, as realistically as possible,” she explained. “Doing it from satellite imagery is time consuming.” She wants to be able to do a 3D model of a square kilometer in less than an hour. And the technology’s almost there, its resolution far finer-grained, the time lessening by the day.
“Never Allow a Fair Fight”
Lee Schwartz, the State Department’s 8th Geographer, patrols international boundaries. Lately, he’s been working on participatory mapping and complex emergency responses. He described the growth of open-source mapping, the data fed by people in local communities. “This technology exploded after the Haiti earthquake, when a lot of information was being provided by satellite imagery” and made available to first responders. Now Schwartz’s office has MapGive, an initiative that encourages and increases volunteer participation.
“All I care about is good data,” he said, “whether it’s Big Data, whether it’s scraped from the web”—or supplied by somebody’s uncle, who’s been trained to map his neighborhood. The idea is to “overcome the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we didn’t let local communities map themselves.” Now that local data is being gathered, he added, “we are getting people from remote areas telling us that U.S. official boundaries are wrong, and we are correcting that.”
Efforts to correct mistakes, respond to disasters, or map poverty warm the heart. But other aspects of geospatial intelligence are rife with ethical challenges, from potential invasions of privacy to the violation of the confidentiality of individuals who agree to provide income or other demographic information. “Don’t expect lawyers to catch up,” warned Schwartz. “There are going to be guidelines that need to be created by those who are doing the work.”
An audience member asked whether access for people who’ve historically been marginalized was “compatible with capitalism and the increasingly hierarchical structures here in the U.S.” Ness Sandoval, who teaches sociology at SLU and is one of the leaders of the GeoSLU initiative, said that in his own work, he wants to make data available to empower everyday citizens in their fight against longstanding patterns of discrimination. Complex data can be used to examine policies and push for “spatial justice.”
The NGA does its share of noble work, too. It pushes out notices used by mariners around the world, keeping them safe at sea. It collects data that helps first responders offer efficient help during humanitarian emergencies. Most recently, it’s been providing support during the flooding in Mozambique. But its representatives were frank about its priorities.
“The reason we exist is to give advantage to our country,” said Munsell, “and as director [Robert] Cardillo used to say, ‘to never allow a fair fight.’”
“An Instrument of Evolution”
Jack Dangermond is president of the Environmental Systems Research Institute, which provides geographic information systems. ESRI is based in California but now has offices in both St. Charles and Cortex—as well as many local clients, including the city of St. Louis. The NGA had a long history of separate, stovepiped enterprises, Dangermond remarked. Then “two big things happened: the internet and geography.” Those two big things have connected the various parts of the NGA, and the new framework “integrates all the -ologies—geology, sociology, psychology, biology—and all the different intelligence types. And it can be connected through maps that allow us to see patterns and relationships you can’t normally see.”
Dangermond described the NGA’s basic process, beginning with measurement, its historical mainstay, then visualizing those measurements through maps, analyzing them, overlaying other information, predicting “where bad guys are gonna go,” designing strategies, offering information to support decision-making, and taking action. That process isn’t just for defense, he said; it applies just as well to government, policing, forestry, flood prediction. And it’s “evolving to become a new kind of infrastructure. A geospatial infrastructure. I think this is the time, right about now, where this science shows up and becomes actually an instrument of evolution.”
Later, he added a warning: “Government is changing, because private sector technologies are maturing, and they are doing what only government used to do. These advances Microsoft and Google and others are making are replacing some of the services government has offered in the past.” At the same time, “the Chinese are moving in with their cloud computing and taking over whole countries… Now is the time when [the U.S.] government has to be resilient and take advantage of those private-sector ideas that are emerging…. We need to have an open democracy response.”
And the public sector needs talent. “Many will be motivated to go into public service because they have not only the skills but also the heart to make this country great. So watch out, China. Watch out, Russia. They don’t know what they’re messing with, with respect to the American spirit.”
