Kestrel CEO Interview with Special Operations Technology
In an actual mission environment, Barbara Flanagan, CEO of Boeing Kestrel, said the company's TAC solution can make an enormous difference in monitoring and managing data. "Leveraging the inherent data processing and visualization capabilities of TAC, Boeing Kestrel supports elements of the special operations community by providing a real-time and holistic common operations and intelligence picture," she said. "Boeing is placing special emphasis on supporting global synchronization of SOF missions by marshaling vast quantities of all source data and persistently searching and monitoring all of that data via TAC for SOF's essential elements of information."
The results of that process, Flanagan said, are then presented to planners in a common user interface that incorporates both geospatial and nodal analysis tools. "This advanced analytic capability allows planners, analysts and decision-makers to share data, questions, methodology and findings in real time, and plug any new data source into the picture as the operational situation dictates," she said.
Flanagan said the company's products enable analysis of a wide variety of data types, both by analysts at various headquarters and by warfighters in the field. "These data sources include unstructured text, whether open source or record message traffic, complete with attachments, and multimedia files, including larger documents and sound files, sketches, images, diagrams and videos," she said. "These sources of information, from any language, are added to sources of data extracted from databases—structured data— so that the combination of these unstructured and structured data sources provide all-source insight to the analyst and decision-maker."
Read the interview here.
TAC Support for Warfighters
Among the many clients that Kestrel supports, we highlight the TAC support we provide for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) -- through Kestrel's TAC, JIEDDO analysts have increased their efficiency and provided more effective analysis of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). These analysts save over 50% of their time conducting research, according to one study, by using TAC to process structured and unstructured text -- and providing alerts of anomalous activity.