Animoto = Automated Imagery PED

Over the past two days, I've spent quite a bit of time with Stevie Clifton, Co-founder & CTO of Animoto. Besides being one of the coolest things I've seen in years, Animoto is giving us a glimpse of automated imagery PED (Processing, Exploitation, Dissemination). First an introduction.

Animoto Productions, a self described "bunch of techies and film/TV producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out" have released a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos. The site uses their patent-pending technology and high-end motion design to fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. By using Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology, "it analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film." Their AWS spike story is now famous in the cloud computing computing.

Now let's fast-forward 5, no, 2 years. A UAV is now flying over the US southern border streaming live video to an intelligence center. Using frame-grabbing technology, it forwards a series of still images to the automated intelligence exploitation center. The face recognition program matches one of the images to a known smuggler, which kicks of an automatic query of NCIC and NLETS. Timestamp information is also used to create an audio track from the many high fidelity microphones in the area. The audio, still frames and automatic query data is then sent to the Animoto engine, which uses the available meta-data to produce a intelligence video and transmits it, in near-real-time, to the nearest CBP unit for appropriate interdiction.

WOW!!

By the way, Animoto uses Amazon Web Services with Rightscale to provide it's service.

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Valiant Angel - A Perfect PED Application for Cloud Computing

A few weeks ago in an article title "Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination", I described two instances where the newspaper industry used cloud computing in order to process, exploit and disseminate information. In that article I postulated that this is one reason why the intelligence community is interested in cloud computing.

Well Signal Magazine has recently highlighted a specific program where the DoD could use a similar approach. In a project called Valiant Angel, the Joint Intelligence Laboratory, located at the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, is working on a way for commanders to handle massive amounts of full-motion video being provided from unmanned platforms.

In addition to storing, moving, communicating and accessing large amounts of data, Valiant Angel is also addressing full-motion video processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED). Col. Chuck Mehle II, USA, commander of the Joint Transformation Command for Intelligence (JTC-I), JFCOM, notes that this aspect of full-motion video management is important because currently different people have different meanings for PED.

“For some, PED might be sticking yellow stickies on a screen after the event happens, and then taking notes about it as the video is displayed to them. But Valiant Angel gives them the capability—the John Madden-type capability—to drop the icon onto that video frame. Let’s say there is an event such as an IED [improvised explosive device] placement or an IED detonation or defusing. Immediately across the Defense Department, intelligence enterprise alerts will go out to those people who subscribe to that type of event, that geographic region, that timeframe, you name it,” he explains.

Such a requirement is perfect for cloud computing. An ability to meet surge storage and computing requirements by securely scaling into a on-demand cloud computing infrastructure could actually make projects like Valiant Angel affordable. Since it would be costly and impractical to buy the equipment needed to meet all possible tactical situations, a platform with an inherent ability to expand into a commercially provided cloud infrastructure could be ideal. It's very difficult to predict real-time tactical processing, exploitation and dissemination requirements. Cloud computing approaches could definitely provide a better option.

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Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

So why is the intelligence community so interested in cloud computing? Three letters: PED (Processing, Exploitation, Dissemination). Take these two real life examples from the publishing industry.

Jim Staten of Forrester Research provided an example of how the New York Times leverage the cloud. The Times wanted to makes its historic archives available for online access. They needed to process 11 million articles and turn them into .pdf files. Initial estimates outlined that hundreds of servers and about 4 Tb of storage would be necessary. The IT organization at the Times estimated a months-long delay before beginning, the need for a significant budget and highlighted the difficulty of locating the computing resources. The project manager give Amazon Web Services a try and kicked off 100 EC2 instances and 4 terabytes of S3 storage. The job was finished the next day with a total cost of $240.

Another hard example comes from the Washington Post. Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The Washington Post, used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to launch 200 server instances to process 17,481 pages of non-searchable PDF images into a searchable online library. With a processing speed of approximately 60 seconds per page, job was completed within nine hours and provided web portal access to the public 26 hours later. Harkins ruminates, “EC2 made it possible for this project to happen at the speed of breaking news. I used 1,407 hours of virtual machine time for a final expense of $144.62. The database of Hillary Clinton’s 1993-2001 Schedule is publicly available at: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/clinton-schedule/.

Examples like this show how cloud computing techniques can be used to revolutionize PED processes. By increasing the use of automation and focusing our analyst on higher level exploitation tasks, near-real time exploitation and dissemination of critical intelligence products may be enabled in the very near term with cloud computing.

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