Actionable Intelligence Research Articles

Partnership policing: Is it relevant in Kano, Nigeria?

This article explores the ways in which African approaches to policing challenge western preferences for transparent and equitable forms of partnership-based policing. It uses the experience of the Nigeria Police Force in metropolitan Kano to question the value of police–public partnerships as the best way to tackle crime and communal conflict in cities where multiple religious and secular norms and processes affect the meaning and delivery of security and justice. Based on recent fieldwork, the article argues that while the need to negotiate with Kano’s semi-state and informal policing providers has not reconfigured the Nigerian police’s authority practices, the city’s relative stability owes much to the political and technical skills with which senior officers manage Kano’s competitive environment. Policing in Kano emphasizes the need for clarity of purpose, actionable intelligence and robust operations, rather than partnership.

Pragmatists, Deliberativists, and Democracy: The Quest for Inclusion

Pragmatists, Deliberativists, and Democracy: The Quest for Inclusion

Learning Analytics: A Case Study of the Process of Design of Visualizations

The ability to visualize student engagement and experience data provides valuable opportunities for learning support and curriculum design. With the rise of the use of learning analytics to provide “actionable intelligence” [1] on students’ learning, the challenge is to create visualisations of the data which are clear and useful to the intended audience. This process of finding the best way to visually represent data is often iterative, with many different designs being trialled before the final design is settled upon. This paper presents a case study of the process of refining a visualization of students’ learning experience data. In this case the aim was to create a visual representation of the continuity of care students were exposed to during a longitudinal placement as part of a medical degree. The process of visualization refinement is outlined as well as the lessons learnt along the way.

How are the Embedded Chips Going to Affect Our Lives?

The miniaturization of Embedded Chips has resulted in their implantability in animate and inanimate things around us. Thus the animate and inanimate world is now connected. This has triggered the cycle of technology connects human beings to things around us, converts that to data, information, knowledge, actionable intelligence, services, and then sends back to human beings, in the form of much needed services. The emerging future brought about by embedded chips holds a symbiosis of human beings, computers, and things that bring to our service an invisible army of miniaturized service robots at our service.

Academic analytics in a medical curriculum: Enabling educational excellence

<p>The developing field of academic analytics seeks to turn data from educational systems into actionable intelligence for the improvement of teaching and learning. This paper reports on the implementation of analytics in a new medical school with an integrated curriculum and clinical focus. Analytics addressed two challenges in the curriculum: providing evidence of appropriate curriculum coverage and assessing student engagement and equity while on clinical placement. This paper describes the tools and approaches used, and outlines the lessons learnt. These lessons include the risk of a simplistic use of visualisations, their potential to generate important questions, the value of a flexible approach to tool selection, the need for relevant skills, and the importance of keeping the audience central. Although there is much further potential for the school to realise, academic analytics have already been a critical enabler of educational excellence.</p><p><em>An Outstanding Paper Award recipient, ascilite Hobart 2011 Conference</em></p>

Academic analytics in a medical curriculum: Enabling educational excellence

<span>The developing field of academic analytics seeks to turn data from educational systems into actionable intelligence for the improvement of teaching and learning. This paper reports on the implementation of analytics in a new medical school with an integrated curriculum and clinical focus. Analytics addressed two challenges in the curriculum: providing evidence of appropriate curriculum coverage and assessing student engagement and equity while on clinical placement. This paper describes the tools and approaches used, and outlines the lessons learnt. These lessons include the risk of a simplistic use of visualisations, their potential to generate important questions, the value of a flexible approach to tool selection, the need for relevant skills, and the importance of keeping the audience central. Although there is much further potential for the school to realise, academic analytics have already been a critical enabler of educational excellence.</span>

Terrorism financing and the threat to financial institutions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore countering the financing of terrorism and its impact on financial institutions.Design/methodology/approachActual examples of terrorist financing are considered, as well as the international and Canadian framework for financial institutions.FindingsThe system for countering the financing of terrorism can be improved to lower costs and risks to financial institutions and to enhance actionable intelligence. A balance must be sought between the objective, actionable intelligence and the mechanism used to advance that objective.Research limitations/implicationsThere is limited research on terrorism financing and little statistical data.Practical implicationsSome simple and modest reforms to the framework are suggested; policy makers need to consider their goals and revaluate the existing framework.Originality/valueThere is little writing in this area. This paper would be of interest to financial institutions, regulators, law enforcement and the intelligence community.

Mining anomalous events against frequent sequences in surveillance videos from commercial environments

In the UK alone there are currently over 4.2 million operational CCTV cameras, that is virtually one camera for every 14th person, and this figure is increasing at a fast rate throughout the world (especially after the tragic events of 9/11 and 7/7) ( Norris, McCahill, & Wood, 2004). Security concerns are not the only factor driving the rapid growth of CCTV cameras. Another important reason is the access of hidden knowledge extracted from CCTV footage to be used for effective business decision making, such as store designing, customer services, product marketing, reducing store shrinkage, etc. Events occurring in observed scenes are one of the most important semantic entities that can be extracted from videos ( Anwar & Naftel, 2008). Most of the work presented in the past is based upon finding frequent event patterns or deals with discovering already known abnormal events. In contrast, in this paper we present a framework to discover unknown anomalous events associated with a frequent sequence of events ( A EASP); that is to discover events, which are unlikely to follow a frequent sequence of events. This information can be very useful for discovering unknown abnormal events and can provide early actionable intelligence to redeploy resources to specific areas of view (such as PTZ camera or attention of a CCTV user). Discovery of anomalous events against a sequential pattern can also provide business intelligence for store management in the retail sector. The proposed event mining framework is an extension to our previous research work presented in Anwar et al. (2010) and also takes the temporal aspect of anomalous events against frequent sequence of events into consideration, that is to discover anomalous events which are true for a specific time interval only and might not be an anomalous events against frequent sequence of events over a whole time spectrum and vice versa. To confront the memory expensive process of searching all the instances of multiple sequential patterns in each data sequence an efficient dynamic sequential pattern search mechanism is introduced. Different experiments are conducted to evaluate the proposed anomalous events against frequent sequence of events mining algorithm’s accuracy and performance.

Calling on the cancer sleuths: how cell biologists will do the detective legwork of the postcancer genome era

High-throughput efforts of the past decade have afforded us with the first impressions of how the whole genome actually changes in a patient’s cancer. Computational approaches are playing an integral role in tackling this flood of information, but it has also become clear that cancer will not be solved by improving p values, just like a Manhattan murder mystery will not be solved by going through the phone book. This year’s ASCB Minisymposium on Cancer and Cancer Microenvironment featured some insightful examples of how cell-based research can efficiently use whole-genome information and lead to “actionable intelligence” in our fight against cancer. Euan Slorach, working in the lab of Zena Werb at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), identified a breast cancer oncogene in an amplified region on chromosome 8 that had been linked to disease progression and reduced survival. One of the genes, Zeppo1, stood out as an orthologue of a gene for Drosophila trachea development. Because several such orthologues from Drosophila act in the developing mammary gland, they hypothesized that Zeppo1 might regulate breast architecture. In mammary epithelial cells, the transcription factor induces epithelial to mesenchymal transition, and it causes tumors and metastatic spread in a xenotransplant model. Their data illustrate how a hypothesis derived from organ development in a different species can help solve a cancer problem: “I think it provides further support to the idea that cancer can be viewed as development gone astray,” says Slorach. Zeppo-specific inhibition might even be beneficial beyond the context of the amplicon, according to their xenotransplant data. We will need to learn more about the role of Zeppo1 in normal tissue as its suppression is entertained as a therapeutic approach. The derived preclinical mouse models will be key to answering such questions. There might even be benefits according to Groucho Marx, who said that “we’re twice as funny without Zeppo.” When breast cancer metastasizes to the lung, the deposited cells often lay dormant for years at the distant site. Hua Gao, working with Filippo Giancotti at Memorial Sloan Kettering, expressed the transcriptome of a highly metastatic cell line in a dormant cell type to identify genes that trigger distant awakening in vivo. Their expandable method successfully identified genes that precipitate lung-specific metastasis and generate expression signatures that have been associated with metastatic relapse to the lung in patient samples. Presentations focusing on the genetics of lethal prostate cancer (Lloyd Trotman, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), on the connection between breast tumor progression and mechanical cues (Jose Lopez, from the Valery Weaver lab, UCSF), the interplay of angiogenesis and cell adhesion in glioblastoma (Joseph McCarty, MD Anderson), and novel mechanisms behind attracting metastatic cells (Dan Ishihara, lab of Dianne Cox, Albert Einstein College of Medicine) perfectly illustrated how the cancer cell community is working on a seamless zoom—from a global view of the cancer genome down into the street view of molecular interactions—in unprecedented detail. It is also up to this community to ensure that we help translate these results into ever more faithful cancer models and cancer therapy.

A process for anticipating and shaping adversarial behavior

AbstractA new approach for anticipating and shaping adversarial behavior is developed and demonstrated. The approach extends the notion of prediction, which is a forecast of the future from a third party point of view, to anticipation, which is a forecast from the perspective of an entity having partial control in a domain. Shaping utilizes the models developed for anticipation to determine actions that influence another influential entity (e.g., an enemy) and actions to direct the emergent phenomena of a domain according to an entity's objectives. The approach is developed using principles of control theory and demonstrated in the southeastern region of Afghanistan. A key capability demonstrated by this approach is its ability to handle proactive adversaries when actionable intelligence is nonexistent. In the demonstration, Taliban (Red) combat actions are anticipated from the perspective of the coalition forces (Blue) across time, across space, and by the current state of the region and then shaped to Blue's desires. Shaping identifies periods of time that simultaneous or alternating Blue combat actions in different regions help meet Blue's military and nonmilitary objectives. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011

The Intelligibility of Extra-Legal State Action: A General Lesson for Debates on Public Emergencies and Legality

This is the penultimate draft of an article to be published in Legal Theory. Some legal theorists deny that states can conceivably act extra-legally, in the sense of acting contrary to domestic law. This position finds its most robust articulation in the writings of Hans Kelsen, and has more recently been taken up by David Dyzenhaus in the context of his work on emergencies and legality. This paper seeks to demystify their arguments and, ultimately, contend that we can intelligibly speak of the state as a legal wrongdoer or a legally unauthorized actor.

Actionable Intelligence

Actionable Intelligence

Enhancing patent landscape analysis with visualization output

A patent landscape analysis can be defined as a state-of-the-art patent search that provides graphic representations of information from search results. The focus is patents and patent applications from a given technology area or company patent portfolio. Unlike a traditional state-of-the-art search which provides relevant information in text format, patent landscape analysis provides graphics and charts to demonstrate patenting trends, leading patent assignees, collaboration partners, white space analysis, technology evaluations, etc. In this article, we will illustrate two case studies from a more in-depth evaluation of some text mining tools. Output from these tools may be integrated into patent analysis workflow to yield critical visual views of the data and actionable business intelligence.

Intelligence-led Peacekeeping: The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), 2006–07

In the slums of Haiti, where pistol and machete wielding gangs dominated the populace through murder, intimidation, extortion, and terror, a UN peacekeeping mission managed to established law, order, and government control. The United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH) succeeded by ‘taking on’ the gangs in a series of military and police ‘search and arrest’ operations in 2006–07. The achievement was made possible by thorough ‘intelligence preparation of the environment’. This paper tells the story of the ‘intelligence-led’ military–police–civil operations and how they transformed the Haitian slum of Cité Soleil from a foreboding place inaccessible to police for years to one in which the UN workers could safely walk its streets. The functions, structures, problems and challenges of the mission's intelligence capability are described, especially the work of the Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC). Human intelligence proved to be key, while technologies helped considerably. Within the United Nations, intelligence remains a controversial and sensitive matter but the Haiti mission provides a valuable model of how to gather and use actionable intelligence.

Linking technology intelligence to open innovation

The explosive growth of the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in data sources for (competitive) technology intelligence. Appropriate implementation and use of IT tools to gather and analyze these data is of key importance for the creation of actionable technology intelligence. A strategy to optimize investments in the identified technologies becomes of paramount importance if an organization wants to match knowledge and ideas originating from outside of the organization with internal core competences. Such a strategy can create competitive advantage by effectively linking technology intelligence to open innovation. We show how VIB, a life sciences research organization, has established technology intelligence processes to identify a multitude of external technologies of interest, which are subsequently “probed” for their potential and fit with VIB using real options reasoning, thereby supporting open innovation. Our methodology may be useful for other organizations which are considering implementing open innovation approaches.

Speed Kills: Analyzing the Deployment of Conventional Ballistic Missiles

Should the United States deploy conventional ballistic missiles (CBMs) in support of the prompt global strike (PGS) mission? Most important, do the political-military benefits outweigh the risks of CBM deployment? The United States, if it works to mitigate the risk of misperception and an inadvertent nuclear response, should deploy near-term CBMs in support of the PGS mission. The prompt response of CBMs would likely be sufficient to defeat many time-sensitive, soft targets, provided actionable intelligence was available. Near-term CBMs, those options capable of being deployed prior to 2013, would have the required attributes to defeat their targets: payload flexibility, throw weight, and accuracy. More specifically, the U.S. Navy's Conventional Trident Modification is a cost-effective, near-term PGS option that would mitigate the concerns of CBM opponents. The large-scale use of midterm and long-term CBMs against mobile targets and hard and deeply buried targets, however, will require a wider range of technologies that have yet to mature. Thus, the United States should continue investing in research and development for a broad portfolio of PGS options to cover the emerging target set.

Sustainable Living through Ambient Intelligence: A Bi-directional Publish-Subscribe System Using a Cross-layer Design

Event Abstract Back to Event Sustainable Living through Ambient Intelligence: A Bi-directional Publish-Subscribe System Using a Cross-layer Design Yang Liu1, Boon-Chong Seet1* and Adnan Al-Anbuky1 1 Auckland University of Technology, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, New Zealand The current research on ambient intelligence (AmI) has focused largely on enhancing the healthcare of people, such as the elderly and disabled, by supporting their daily activities through AmI. Recently, AmI has also been applied in the persuasion of people into behavioural changes, such as to behave in a more sustainable and environmentally responsible manner through delivering persuasive content tailored to users at the right time and at the right place [1]. In this paper, we propose to move beyond persuasion to actually support people towards an ecologically sustainable way of life through actionable intelligence, which we define as the timely information provided by the ambient environment that allows the user to initiate a course of action for more sustainable outcomes.For instance, sustainable living entails a conscious effort of the people to use water and energy resources more efficiently. Future textile may be smart tagged, e.g. using RFID, with details on the type of textile, who it belongs to, and embedded with sensors such as E-nose to detect its soiled level. To enable water- and energy-efficient laundering in an ambient home environment, the actionable intelligence to the user can be the auto-identification of all soiled items in the home to maximize the wash load, and also their type and soiled level to allow choosing the most efficient settings for the wash machine. Reducing production of waste and using products that are more environmentally sustainable is another approach to reducing our ecological footprints. To support the notion of ‘sustainable shopping’ where wastage of food and use items is kept minimal and ‘eco-labeled’ products are given greater consideration, the actionable intelligence to the user can be the current usage level of use items and consumption level of food as detected by, e.g. embedded weight sensors in item holders, which in turn generates a list of recommended products that are eco-friendly while matching the cost budget of the user.In this paper, the publish-subscribe communication model (Fig. 1) is adopted for efficient, timely delivery of actionable intelligence from the ambient environment to users. In simplest form, publishers are just sensors that publish sensed data to broker nodes, which in turn deliver to users who have subscribed to receive them. Different users can subscribe to different types of data from different sensors. The publish-subscribe model is chosen as it does not require all entities of the system (publishers, subscribers, brokers) to be connected with each other, all at the same time. Thus, it can be better at handling common issues in sensor networks such as intermittent connectivity and sensor failures. This paper further proposes a novel bi-directional publish-subscribe system, where publishers can also be subscribers, and vice-versa, and thus information flow can occur in both directions. A context-aware user device (or appliance) that subscribes to certain sensed data to generate context at higher level of abstraction, can also be a publisher of this context, which can be subscribed by low level sensors for optimizing their performance (Fig. 2). Our future work includes a performance analysis of the proposed bi-directional publish-subscribe system and its support for cross-layer sensor network optimization using higher-layer context information. 312_Figure_2 312_Figure_1

Decision Superiority Process Model

Decision superiority is achieved not just by acquiring and assessing the right information, but by translating it into actionable knowledge that can be exploited in the decision making process. Achieving decision superiority is necessary, because the decisions made by commanders and staff, ultimately, determine mission outcome. Although technology is integral to the process, it is limited by factors such as bandwidth optimization, system interoperability, and information flow optimization. However, most important to the Command and Control (C$^{2}$) decision makers today are the cognitive processes that enable commanders to determine when to employ C$^{2}$ information systems to support C$^{2}$ decisions and the methods of how to respond to cues provided by the systems. This paper describes a continuous decision making process model that is specifically suited to support C$^{2}$ decision superiority. Decision makers are continually inundated with data, albeit most data provides non actionable intelligence and unreliable information. Inadequate data is inadmissible, specifically from the perspective of a C$^{2}$ information systems design, where timely delivery of the right information to C$^{2}$ decision makers is essential, thus, context awareness is a key necessity. Context in C$^{2}$ operations is dynamic and includes factors such as mission, enemy, terrain (and weather), personnel, time available, and civil support. Understanding and keeping track of these variables is the cornerstone of future C$^{2}$ decision making, especially for network centric warfare operations. The DecisionEdge™ model is based on the context-goal alternatives construct, which recognizes as context changes, the goal might also change, thus, precipitating the need for generating a new set of alternatives. It should be noted that goals are not constant; therefore, they can change when a new mission directive is initiated.

National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism , and: Security and Human Rights (review)

Reviewed by: National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism, and: Security and Human Rights Mahmood Monshipouri (bio) National Insecurity and Human Rights: Democracies Debate Counterterrorism. (Alison Brysk & Gershon Shafir eds., Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 236, plus Index. Security and Human Rights. (Benjamin J. Goold & Liora Lazarus eds.,Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2007), pp. 383, plus Index. The possibility of allowing a culture of security rooted in fear to trump, or even [End Page 817] displace, a laboriously constructed—but still incomplete—culture of human rights presents a real dilemma for the West. After 9/11, the Bush administration took several steps in its announced "war against terror" that resulted in the torture or degrading treatment of many individuals and prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration has used "the war on terror" to justify a massive expansion in the jurisdiction of the federal government. The USA PATRIOT Act has widened the use of wiretapping on telephone calls and emails and also authorized the Attorney General to detain foreign nationals on mere suspicion, without due process and normal legal protections under the US Constitution. The executive's fixation with security has diluted the importance of the rule of law in the struggle against terrorism, failing to protect due process rights within ordinary criminal justice systems. The question is: are counterterrorism campaigns bound to undercut civil liberties or can they be reconciled? As these timely and stimulating volumes make clear, the relationship between security and human rights is complex. A more nuanced analysis is required to capture the true complexity of reconciling the two. National Insecurity and Human Rights, edited by Brysk and Shafir, offers a historical and comparative analysis with a view toward exploring the ways in which democracies have coped and can cope with the threat of terror while protecting human rights. The book's central theme offers a pungent criticism: human rights violations erode national security and democracy. The contribution by Richard Falk calls into question the integration of counter-proliferation into the broader issue of counterterrorism, arguing that this wider set of global objectives further complicates comparisons of US counterterrorism operations with those undertaken by other countries. This approach, Falk points out, explains widening "implications of declaring 'war' rather than relying on enhanced law enforcement."1 Examining the Bush administration's policy under the rubric of "war on terror," David P. Forsythe argues that although coercive interrogation may from time to time yield actionable intelligence of considerable value, there are many negative consequences involved in the process. Those include, among others, the decline of US soft power, "damage to its sense of proper identity and honor, undermining its efforts to protect its own personnel when captured in the future, and above all the antagonism and hostility of foreign populations."2 The chapters by Colm Campbell (Northern Ireland) and Todd Landman (the United Kingdom) demonstrate the rising significance of international humanitarian law in the long run. Britain leaned toward peaceful solutions in Northern Ireland only after they stopped abusive tactics. In the case of Israel, Gershon Shafir, shows that according to the Landau Commission, "physical pressure" was used against 85 percent of Palestinian terror suspects after the first uprising (intifadah). That policy did not prevent the escalation of wider violence in the occupied territories. To make torture exceptional rather than systematic, Shafir asserts, requires ending the cumulative result of war, occupation, [End Page 818] colonialism, and colonization.3 The Spanish case, as explained by Salvador Marti, Pilar Domingo, and Pedro Ibarra, indicates the perils of the politicization of counterterrorism and benefits of leaving the matter in the hands of the police and the judiciary. The context within which the declaration of a "permanent ceasefire" by ETA in spring 2006 was issued underscored the importance of introducing measures of accountability and control over criminal justice procedures. The authors echo the words of Spain's prosecutor of ETA and Pinochet, Baltasar Garzon, who once said: "I come from the country of the Inquisition. . . . We had to learn from experience that torture, mistreatment, and degradation do not work."4 Howard Adelman looks into the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer born...

Rapid Needs Appraisal in the modern NHS: potential and dilemmas

This paper reports on our experience of undertaking a Rapid Appraisal of Health and Social Needs (RNA) in West Cumbria, UK. RNA aims to identify community-defined problems and to collect intelligence for action rather than simply for documentation. The broad nature of the study is summarised and we reflect critically on methodological and structural issues that arose. A number of inter-related themes were significant: the limitations of a ‘rapid’ approach; within an action frame, the implications that arose from focusing on locality capacity-building; the ability that commissioning organisations had in this public health domain; and the way in which such organisations tend to construct ‘needs’. These themes then are located in problematic contexts. Primarily, we were working with a fledgling NHS organisation, arguably set unrealistically high expectations to deliver innovative public health functions. Furthermore, the desire to see the NHS working more efficiently resulted in the expectation that the exercise should be done in a particular way—within a realist tradition of arriving at quick, simple and ‘definitive’ needs. We conclude by suggesting that if such work is to be meaningful then there needs to be a number of pre-cursors: an initial consensus on the nature of ‘need’; an agreement between commissioners and researchers around common frameworks and realistic expectations of the process; and finally, an acceptance of the importance of history in this work and the way histories of local inter-agency work reflect embedded forms of local knowledge. We suggest that NHS volatility means that much of this knowledge is often lost.