Proactive Information Ga T Homeland Security Teams

I magine a software assistant agent (AA) that proactively provides relevant concise personalized information to an analyst or first responder and collaborates with other AAs to share knowledge and arrange person-to-person contact. The following descriptive scenario provides an example application of this concept. A report of an explosion at a chemical plant is received by a homeland security (HLS) analyst, local firefighters, and state police. The AA for the analyst “reads” the report and immediately retrieves information about what chemicals exist in the plant and a map of nearby dangerous and vulnerable facilities. The firefighters arrive on the scene and identify the sector from which flames and smoke are emanating. An AA provides the firefighters with information on what chemicals are likely to be burning, how to extinguish the fire, and the potential health hazards of the smoke. The AA notifies the HLS analyst that it is a harmless gas. Plant personnel tell state police they saw a suspicious individual in a car in the parking lot. The police enter the license plate number of the suspicious car and the analyst AA immediately searches for aliases of the owner and links to terrorist organizations. A link is found and the HLS analyst’s AA searches for an AA of an expert on that terrorist group. The terrorist expert AA notifies the HLS AA that an associate of the suspicious person is a chemical engineer that works in a nearby plant where another explosion has just been reported. The HLS AA discovers that if the two smoke plumes intersect they will create a deadly acid mist. The AA plots the smoke plumes on a map and notifies the HLS analyst that the combined plume will reach a crowded sports stadium in approximately 15 minutes. The AA immediately initiates a phone call between the HLS analyst and stadium security. This scenario illustrates how a team of software agents could support a team of people to accomplish a time-critical task related to U.S. homeland security activities. One of the major technical issues in designing software agents with these capabilities is they need to be By Paul Kogut, John Yen, Yui Leung, Shuang Sun, Rui Wang, Ted Mielczarek, and Ben Hellar