David Ebert, "Trustable Information for Security Applications: Visual Analytics for Reliable, Effective Decision Making"

Summary: Information, not just data, is key to today’s security challenges. To solve these security challenges requires not only advancing computer science and big data analytics but requires new analysis and decision-making environments that enable reliable, decisions from trustable, understandable information. These environments are successful when they effectively couple human decision making with advanced, guided analytics in human-computer collaborative discourse and decision making (HCCD). Our HCCD approach builds upon visual analytics, traceable information, and human-guided analytics and machine learning and focuses on empowering the decision maker through interactive visual analytic environments where non-digital human expertise and experience can be combined with state-of-the-art and transparent analytical techniques. When we combine this approach with real-world application-driven research, not only does the pace of scientific innovation accelerate, but impactful change occurs. I’ll describe how we have applied these techniques to homeland and community security, resiliency,public safety and disaster management.