To make it even easier to partner, we’ve developed NOME, which allows all our partners to crowdsource and create foundation data in areas with no existing coverage. Right now, there are more than 600 web users from 15 contributing member nations on our World Wide Web presence and more than a thousand users on our top secret domain. Later this summer, we’ll expand NOME to our secret domain, so many more military users can access it.

Here’s a recent example from the city of Yei, in South Sudan. In seven weeks, Team NOME added more than 700 kilometers of new roads and more than 70,000 new features. While you might be nervous that you’re looking at one of the 600 editors, please be assured that all of my work is QC’d by real experts!

We’re pressing ahead with outposts not only in Silicon Valley, but also in New York, St. Louis, Boston, right here in San Antonio, and Ybor City, near Tampa. Those teams are creating innovative solutions with non-traditional partners and networks.

I say again: We’ll go wherever the talent exists and apply it wherever the mission demands. The bottom line is that partnerships benefit us all. Together, Lewis and Clark blazed trails for American trade routes and security. Wilbur and Orville created manned flight. Sergey and Larry’s collaboration now allows us to find routine knowledge in seconds. And Ben and Jerry – well, they make summer just a little
sweeter.

Partnerships are obviously a prime necessity for Team GEOINT to deal with the rising wave of data. But, we also need to develop innovative new tools and training. When we talk about the future and analytic modernization we often focus on discrete data and tools – Activity Based Intelligence, Structured Observation Management and Object-Based Production.

But, it’s also about putting the right pieces in place to automate the workflow. It’s about driving effective collection and analysis. Remember those analysts watching every frame of every game? Our goal is to automate 75% of their tasks, so they have more time to analyze that last play and more accurately anticipate the next one. So they can look much harder at our toughest problems – the 25% that require the most attention. So they know what to do on fourth down.

Fortunately, we’re already seeing that potential. We’ve had several resounding successes over the last year – here’s one of just many. Since I opened with Normandy, let’s look at a new GEOINT Service we call Beachfront. Beachfront automates the creation of new coastline using commercial satellite imagery sources. This is the immense river delta system on the border of India and Bangladesh. It would have
taken one analyst five hours to produce these vectors manually – it took Beachfront less than six minutes. 300 minutes to 6. That’s a lot of time freed up by computers to perform analytic work that today only humans can do.

NGA’s Safety of Navigation mission is one of our oldest and one of our most critical missions. Keeping navigation safe in the maritime, aeronautical and topographic areas – including the precision work being done by our geomatics experts – is at the core of NGA’s support to our nation and its allies.\ We’ve seen a shift from manual to digital and now we’re moving into the augmented and automated arena with our ongoing foundation modernization efforts. While geodesy remains the lifeblood of NGA, the heart of our profession is Analysis and it’s always been both an art and a family of sciences.

So now, it’s time to add that extra spark – from the electricity of a circuit board or the flash of a great idea – the thing that takes us beyond where we thought we could go.

The movement from pictures to pixels to data and the shift away from some of the highly manual work I’ve described is a significant change not only to our processes, but also to our workforce. So we’ve started the process of retooling and reskilling our most valuable asset – our people. And as we shift from pixels to data, it’s important that every teammate has the necessary data literacy and
computational skills. That includes not only the analysts who derive insight from data to create coherence from chaos, but the supervisors who manage them and the leaders who make strategic decisions about that data.

Of course, we’ll still need creativity, intuition, critical thinking and intellectual diversity. So our vibrant recruiting pipeline is open. Because we’ll need people who can solve problems we haven’t even thought of yet. The smart money is on creating user-driven and user-developed solutions.

At last year’s symposium, I discussed GEOINT Services as our flagship effort to deliver content and services to our customers, utilizing the Cloud. Well, I'm happy to report that GEOINT Services is now well underway and we’ve transitioned implementation to our development side of the house.

One highlight of GEOINT Services is a multi-disciplined team of analysts, technologists and data scientists called the Rapid Feedback Team. They deconstruct customer workflows to better understand their pain points, which helps us and our customers evaluate how GEOINT Services would tie into the workflows, but in a low-risk way.

Now, adding more programming skills to our workforce will allow us to open the floodgates of information opportunities. To use open content first and then augment it with classified sources – to reject, confirm or increase confidence in analytic judgments – that makes the most sense to me. Now, I tried to do this myself when I took a Python class. I’ll never be a real coder, but my goal is to be able to communicate a little better with the workforce and ask them better questions, and to think differently about data.

It’s a lot to learn. And when I see initiatives like #WECODE , Women Enriching Coding, that find creative ways to help users at every level build and improve their skills, I see them fitting right into this moment, where we ride the wave to new heights.

When it comes to GEOINT Professional Certification, we’re definitely having an excellent ride. NSG personnel now have the opportunity to get eight operational certifications with three more programs due online this year. We’ve administered nearly 14,000 tests and awarded more than 9,000 certifications to GEOINT professionals worldwide. We have the largest intelligence certification program in the
Department of Defense. And the National Commission for Certifying Agencies has accredited three different programs: GEOINT Fundamentals, Imagery Analysis and Aeronautical Analysis. This will all lead to shared standards, shared terminology, shared tradecraft, shared everything – more accessible data for all of Team GEOINT. It will also enable more confidence in our profession across the board. So, as I hope you can tell, I’m bullish about this GEOINT Revolution and the future of our profession.

But there are two areas we’re moving into where I’d appreciate your feedback when we get to Q&A. One is what we’ve started referring to as GEOINT Assurance.

The reality is that any digital connection includes both benefits and risks, because there are nefarious actors out there who – even though they may not have direct links with us – can and do affect our security. It’s not that different from how you must protect your personal data at home, on your laptop or your phone.

Because when so much of what we now do is in the open, we’ve got to safeguard the integrity of the pixels, the data, the commercial providers, the artificial intelligence and the algorithms, to ensure that they haven’t been interrupted or corrupted. In other words, GEOINT pedigree.

While it’s well known in our profession that we can’t completely trust anyone, what we can do is differentiate between bad data and data worth further examination. And that’s what professional GEOINT analysts do, apply their expertise to make these important distinctions. We could button up and play it safe, we could go back to the classified world. But to not work in the open, where so many of our answers and our customers now reside would be negligent.

The second challenge I’d appreciate some feedback on is the area of augmentation and automation. How do we best take action here? Because if it’s done right, augmentation will enable our analysts to find meaning above, beneath and beyond the data. Finding the meaning is really our bread and butter. It’s where we have the skills, the historic knowledge and the expertise to do it well – so that’s where we
should focus our efforts.

The goal is to let the commercial providers scoop the data, let the algorithms and industry partners give it the first few passes. Then have our analysts do what they do best – understand the world. Where we truly need augmentation most right now is Full Motion Video. Because FMV, as currently practiced, is a critical challenge to NGA and our entire profession. It’s time-consuming, manually intensive, redundantly exploited, poorly integrated and it leaves a great deal of useful data unexploited and undiscovered. In other words, while it remains essential to national security, it’s both extremely costly and extremely inefficient. We must change this, so I just named Buzz Roberts as our new Director of Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Augmentation, and his first challenge will be to address FMV automation.