The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is moving toward an artificial intelligence-based program called ASPEN that will help the agency provide warnings to its customers based on changes in behavior worldwide, the agency’s director said on Wednesday.
Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth said warning is a bigger challenge than the agency’s well-known mission of providing targeting data to decision-makers and combatant commands.
“Warning is a is actually a larger mission because it’s so global,” he said during a discussion hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “As you’re trying to establish through our visual domain, what’s baseline behavior, baseline activity, as opposed to what’s anomalous, and what might we need to be concerned about and warn about?”
NGA relies on imagery and video from satellites, manned and unmanned aircraft, and other sources, and applies analytics to these data to provide customers with targeting, warning, and safety—especially safety of navigation—indicators, maps, and information.
Asked by Defense Daily for a description of the program, NGA this week said “ASPEN is a modernized, integrated suite of analytic capabilities to improve NGA’s end-to-end GEOINT production, exploitation, and dissemination processes using automation and AI.” The agency said ASPEN is a program of record and is five-year modernization effort that began in May 2023.
ASPEN is based on AI but humans are in the loop, Whitworth said.
ASPEN is taking on a larger problem than targeting and it is “a good one to take on to ensure that we take all the structured observations that establish baseline, ensure that workflows are made more efficient because of AI,” he said. “And then, ultimately, ensure that we alert. And I think about a human-machine team. And we make the alert. We make the alarm if there’s something anomalous.”
ASPEN stands for Analytic Services Production Environment for the National System for GEOINT. GEOINT refers to geospatial-intelligence, which NGA is responsible for.
Whitworth last week briefly mentioned ASPEN during the National Security Innovation Base Summit. There, he highlighted how the amount of imagery that NGA absorbs continues to grow each year and the forecast is for substantial growth while the outlook for the agency’s budget is flattish in terms of analysts and compute power.
NGA is increasingly relying on AI programs to help gain efficiencies, he said last week. For example, he said, when attention is turned to high priority areas but behavior still needs to be observed elsewhere to avoid surprises, ASPEN will serve a key role.
“How is it that you can ask the analysts, ‘We can’t drop any balls when it comes to our warning and targeting responsibilities and these priorities, but at the same time, I need you to be training, doing data labeling, to train the machine for this bigger industrial problem.’ We call this ASPEN.”
Maven is NGA’s program of record that uses AI to help find targets amid the vast amounts of imagery the agency sorts through and analyzes. Whitworth last week credited Maven for agency analysts sorting through 40 percent more sensor imagery in the past year than previously due to the computer vision technology (Defense Daily, March 21).
NGA also has other AI efforts underway or planned, including a digital globe mapping effort, studying the ice, and cybersecurity methods, he said on Wednesday.
“So, there are multiple ways but at its core is handling all that data and ensuring that the human gets an advantage, he said “And who better to train the algorithm than the best in the business.”