Scientific Colloquium
May 20, 2011
LISA PORTER
INTELLIGENCE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS ACTIVITY
"Scientific
Challenges Faced by the Intelligence Community"
In October 2007, the Intelligence
Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) was established so that the
intelligence community would have an organization whose sole mission is
to invest in high-risk/high-payoff research programs that have the
potential to provide the U.S. with an overwhelming intelligence
advantage over future adversaries. In this talk, I will describe some
of the scientific challenges faced by our community, which range from
novel sensors to quantum computing to dealing with massive volumes of
disparate and errorful data.
I will then focus on a challenge that is particularly important to our
community but which is prevalent in other communities as well,
including research communities in general – that of cognitive bias.
Examples of cognitive bias include confirmation bias, which is the
tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms
one's preconceptions; and anchoring bias, which is the tendency to rely
too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information, not
because of its accuracy but rather because of its clarity, magnitude,
or effect, or because it is the first piece of information that one
receives on the subject. I will discuss two different research programs
at IARPA that are attempting to address the problem of cognitive bias
in two different ways. One program is leveraging emerging insights from
neuroscience research to build predictive computational brain models
that capture human sensemaking and bias behaviors. Another program is
seeking to dramatically improve the accuracy and timeliness of
forecasts for a broad range of event types, through the development of
advanced techniques that elicit, weight, and combine the judgments of
many intelligence analysts.