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Abstract
Intelligence analysts have the arduous responsibility of processing large amounts of data to determine trends and relationships. Analysts must be able to gather traditional information (signal, human, and measurement and signature intelligence) and nontraditional data (financial and social context) to form actionable intelligence. One source of nontraditional data is Web-based news. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) currently has two projects that will jointly meet part of this requirement. The first is the Real Time News Analysis (RTNA) project. RTNA is being developed to harvest real time streaming data from Web-based news sources and pre-process it by information extraction, categorization, message understanding, concept mining, and fusing. This data will then be fed to ARL’s Social Network Analysis (SNA) project. This is challenging research but with a potential high payoff of providing non-traditional information quickly to analysts.

Biography
Ms. Forester received a Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science from Towson University in January 1987, graduating with Summa cum Laude. She did post graduate training at the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering, The John Hopkins University, where her major concentration was in artificial intelligence and computer vision. She is currently an operations research analyst (computer scientist) in the Computational & Information Science Directorate, Tactical Collaboration & Data Fusion Branch of the ARL, where is works on projects dealing with real time news analysis and social networking.