Vanguard Magazine

T TECHNOLOGY www.vanguardcanada.com AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 37 gathering on Syria. It's essentially a timeline, which shows an evolution in posts about that country over a given period. "You can see each day of the week, the number of postings, and the general sentiment," Isabelle points out. "Red means negative, green means positive, and blue means neutral." Over the span of one year, they have 71 million posts on Syria; 30 million in English, and 40 million machine-translated from Arabic. Scheidl and Isabelle are adamant that although the system it- self can provide mountains of useful information, it still requires a skilled analyst in order to make sense of it all. To prove the point, they search for all documents that men- tion both Syria and chlorine attacks, for which there are 12,000. "Here you can see a big peak," Scheidl says, pointing out the mountain on the timeline. He then narrows down his search to include only the peak, and the posts are further reduced to 4,000. It's safe to say that this "peak" represents a significant event, and each of those 4,000 tweets will be annotated with a certain emotion. If this were a real life scenario, and I was an intelligence analyst, I could use the system's entity recogni- tion to narrow down actors and locations involved in the event, possibly generating some solid leads on who may have been re- sponsible. Unfortunately — and this is where a human brain comes in handy — sometimes emotions tied to certain events can be de- ceiving. "You'll get some that are expressing joy at the negative effects of the attack, and you'll get some that are celebrating the heroism of the lives of the victims, which will register posi- tively," Scheidl explains. "You'd need a good analyst." Isabelle backs him up. "Yes, we're not trying to replace an analyst, by far. We just provide more tools." And although the NRC-Thales-MediaMiser team have un- questionably accomplished that, Scheidl tells me that they're not finished. "This project is ambitious, but it was even more ambitious than you see here," he says. "We had other NRC technologies that were in the pipeline to be implemented." Aberration and trend detection was one of those things. If an intelligence analyst is interested in neo-Nazis, but they haven't been overly active online, the system will automatically be able to monitor the activity, alerting the analyst when there is a peak. Although the NRC set out to prove that their natural language technologies could be applied to the defence and security sec- tor, they've also dredged up some interesting questions about human behaviour, and the true power of big data analytics. If a program can monitor hundreds of millions of tweets at a time, all over the world, watching trends appear and disappear, will the analyst sitting in front of it soon be able to predict the fu- ture? Can they do that now? Can pandemics be detected earlier, or can the population impacts of disasters be addressed faster? Will the military be able to thwart attacks before they start? As Richard and I leave building M-50, I have a feeling that Scheidl and Isabelle would probably answer yes to that ques- tion. The technology that they have proven will make a dra- matic impact on defence and security in Canada for all the right reasons, but like any weapon, much care will have to be taken to ensure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. As Einstein said, information is not knowledge. But Scheidl and Isabelle are getting very close to automating that conver- sion with sophisticated software. Today, they need a good ana- lyst. Tomorrow, I'm not so sure.

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