Booz Allen Hamilton awarded contract for total information awareness support

Washington, D. C., 11/13/2002 Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Falls Church, Va., was awarded a $1,500,000 increment as part of a $62,876,051 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for total information awareness support on Nov. 7, 2002. Work will be performed in Arlington, Va., (5 percent), Falls Church (25 percent), and McLean, Va., (70 percent), and is expected to be completed by Nov. 7, 2007. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. There were an unknown number of bids solicited via Broad Agency Announcement on March 21, 2002, and 26 bids were received. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington is the contracting activity (MDA972-03-C-0005).

What is the Total Information Awareness (TIA) System?

The Program Manager is Dr. John Poindexter and the Deputy Program Manager is Dr. Robert Popp.

The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is a FY02 new-start program. The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists – and decipher their plans – and thereby enable the U.S. to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.

Program Strategy:

The TIA program strategy is to integrate technologies developed by DARPA (and elsewhere as appropriate) into a series of increasingly powerful prototype systems that can be stress-tested in operationally relevant environments, using real-time feedback to refine concepts of operation and performance requirements down to the component level. The TIA program will develop and integrate information technologies into fully functional, leave-behind prototypes that are reliable, easy to install, and packaged with documentation and source code (though not necessarily complete in terms of desired features) that will enable the intelligence community to evaluate new technologies through experimentation, and rapidly transition it to operational use, as appropriate. Accordingly, the TIA program will work in close collaboration with one or more U.S. intelligence agencies that will provide operational guidance and technology evaluation, and act as TIA system transition partners.

Technically, the TIA program is focusing on the development of: 1) architectures for a large-scale counter-terrorism database, for system elements associated with database population, and for integrating algorithms and mixed-initiative analytical tools; 2) novel methods for populating the database from existing sources, create innovative new sources, and invent new algorithms for mining, combining, and refining information for subsequent inclusion into the database; and, 3) revolutionary new models, algorithms, methods, tools, and techniques for analyzing and correlating information in the database to derive actionable intelligence.

from http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Nov2002/c11122002_ct577-02.html and www.darpa.mil/iao/TIASystems.htm