Collaborative Intelligence Spaces

CISpaces is a tool to support the process of sensemaking, complementing human expertise in the generation of intelligence products. This combines a structured, graphical representation of the analyst’s reasoning process with efficient artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically identify plausible hypotheses. CISpaces users can exploit information extracted from open sources, share analyses and work in collaboration. The provenance of both evidence used and analyses (co-)produced are recorded and may be used for further investigation, reporting and audit.

Capturing analysts’ reasoning

CISpaces provides a rigorous means to record and support the process of forming hypotheses from the relationships among information. This core process of reasoning is made explicit, supporting the process and helping to mitigate biases.

Automated Fact Extraction

We use natural language processing algorithms to extract factual claims from open information sources (OSINT) such as Twitter and Facebook.

Identifying hypotheses

We do not rely on the analyst exhaustively enumerating all possible hypotheses. Our evidential reasoning service identifies what evidence and claims together constitute a plausible interpretation of an analysis. The analyst may then explore these possibilities.

Highlighting critical questions

As a further means to mitigate biases in human reasoning, the model highlights critical questions that may undermine inferential assumptions of various kinds: Is there an alternative cause? Do other experts disagree? Is this a witness or is it hearsay?

Collaboration

CISpaces enables teams of analysts to work collaboratively on a problem, recording and making open to scrutiny the provenance of analysis.

Report generation

The explanation service provides options for the analyst to automatically generate natural language reports. Such a report may, for example, concentrate on a specific hypothesis or give an overview of the key areas of uncertainty in the analysis.