XDATA

Warfighters’ missions rely on a virtual net of sensors and communications systems for greater battlefield awareness than at any time in history.  At the same time, demands for actionable information have spiked as warfighters at every level—whether at the planning table or on patrol—are called upon to make well-informed decisions.  To maximize mission effectiveness and enhance national security, the Department of Defense (DoD) is now challenged to more efficiently fuse, analyze and disseminate the massive volumes of data this network produces.

Current DoD systems and processes for handling and analyzing information cannot be efficiently or effectively scaled to meet this challenge.  The volume and characteristics of the data, and the range of applications for data analysis, require a fundamentally new approach to data science, analysis and incorporation into mission planning on timelines consistent with operational tempo.

The XDATA program aims to meet challenges presented by this volume of data by developing computational techniques and software tools for processing and analyzing the vast amount of mission-oriented information for Defense activities.  As part of this exploration, XDATA aims to address the need for scalable algorithms for processing and visualization of imperfect and incomplete data.  And because of the variety of DoD users, XDATA intends to create human-computer interaction tools that could be easily customized for different missions.  Finally, to enable large scale data processing in a wide range of potential settings, XDATA plans to release open-source software toolkits to enable collaboration among the applied mathematics, computer science and data visualization communities.

The XDATA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) was released on March 29, 2012.