Future Point Systems: Visual analytics for critical decision making.

All Source Analysis

  

As intelligence sharing improves and information silos crumble, contemporary intelligence analysts can bring to bear a greater volume and variety of information to their tasks to solve problems. This changing intelligence landscape presents new opportunities and challenges that are unmet by most available analysis software.

SEE, UNDERSTAND, DECIDE, ACT
At Future Point Systems, we provide the only complete solution in the marketplace today for military and intelligence analysts, providing key capabilities across the three main phases of all source intelligence analysis:

• Data Ingestion, Processing, and Integration
• Visual Analysis
• Reporting – Web-based and Conventional Microsoft Office Formats

Unlike competing solutions, Starlight enables analysts to work with a virtually unlimited variety of data types, ranging from structured, semi-structured or unstructured information such as database records, message traffic, and open source material, to geospatial, multimedia, and Internet data. In addition to core VIS technologies, Starlight also provides powerful collaboration capabilities. Whether working alone, in teams, across shifts, in-person or virtually, Starlight's visual analysis tools enable analysts to quickly organize, summarize, and relate this disparate information in powerful ways, all from within a single integrated environment. It’s this unique visual analytic platform that enables analysts to See and Understand the critical information that lies within their data.

Once analysts have employed Starlight’s proprietary visual tools to reach valuable conclusions, they can then export those findings in multiple formats with one click to anyone with access to a web browser. The Starlight web dashboard enables dynamic reporting of values, metadata, charts, graphs and other visuals. In addition, Starlight integrates directly with Google Earth to support reporting of people, events, networks and other key relationships in a geospatial context. Taking advantage of Starlight’s rich reporting capabilities, our software enables analysts as well as senior officers to Decide how to respond to key findings and then Act on those decisions.

In addition to analyst enabling technologies, Starlight also provides information engineering solutions that solve many of the challenges faced in today’s ever changing data driven intelligence environment. From database integration to continuous ingestion, we understand the challenges faced in modern intelligence environments. Starlight provides a solution to process, normalize, enhance and ingest a variety of complex data sources and Starlight Data Engineer (SDE) enables the creation of custom data processors for your particular situation.

Starlight Introduction and Capabilities Overview
A brief video demonstration of Starlight's capabilities in an all-source analysis setting, including examples of our social network analysis (SNA) features and web reporting functionality:
Starlight Introduction and Capabilities Overview

Cyber-Security and Computer Forensics

Starlight has key capabilities for information discovery, processing and visualization, which apply across many applications for Cyber-security and computer forensics, including:

• To analyze a computer system after a break-in, to determine how the attacker gained access and what the attacker did
• In the intelligence or military community, to analyze the information on seized hardware
• In legal cases, computer forensic techniques are frequently used to analyze computer systems belonging to defendants (in criminal cases) or litigants (in civil cases)
• To gather evidence against an employee that an organization wishes to terminate.
  
  The Starlight software solution enables key aspects of the forensic process, including data collection, discovery, investigation/examination, analysis and reporting. More specifically, Starlight enables actionable intelligence in cyber-security and computer forensics in the following ways:
  
  
• Computer network intrusion detection system (NIDS) log file data can be loaded and suspicious connections between machines examined. This data can be combined with other log data to develop a more complete understanding of security breach events.
• The directory structures of hard drives can be displayed and filtered on file modification times to see what activity occurred on what dates. Files from multiple seized drives can be quickly compared to discover identical files that may have been transferred from one machine to another.
• With the Starlight ODBC input module, Starlight can pull data right out of databases and analyze it directly in the Starlight environment.
• Email can be forensically examined to model communications patterns and to summarize email content.

Applying Starlight to the Challenge of Cyber-Security
Brief demonstration illustrating how Starlight's powerful capabilities & visualizations can be applied to real-world cyber-security threats. Starlight Cyber-Security Demonstration

Market and Competitive Intelligence

The phenomenon known as “consumer uploading” has grown dramatically in recent years. Internet users create new content online through blogs, chat forums, social networks and traditional web sites to voice their opinions and provide reviews regarding a variety of experiences, products and services. These consumer opinions can be extraordinarily influential. They can provide valuable insight to both other consumers and to companies regarding anything from first-person experiences with a recently released digital phone to attitudes towards a political message or candidate. This type of candid information is typically uploaded for mass public consumption as more and more users exploit the Internet as a forum for their views.

Starlight is uniquely positioned to harness the value of this consumer-generated content. Through our advanced data processing and visualization techniques, which include the ability to analyze free-text entries, Starlight unlocks the value of this online information. In essence, Starlight enables organizations to understand “the voice of the consumer”. By seamlessly gathering and integrating user-generated content from non-traditional feedback sources (blogs, chat forums, social networking sites), Starlight enables an entirely new channel through which organizations can gain situational awareness and interact with their key stakeholders. In addition to consumer-generated content, there is also a vast amount of corporate information available via the web, including financial reports, press releases and information about new product introductions. All this data can be very useful for competitive analysis. Starlight helps organizations understand what individuals and competitors are saying, and Starlight empowers these organizations to rapidly respond to this market intelligence.

Legal Analytics

Starlight's unique capabilities enable legal analysts to process enormous amounts of heterogeneous data to quickly locate key items or piece together causal chains. This makes it possible to discover and document activities that are related but are reflected in material of different types. Further, SDE's advanced data preprocessing capabilities enable analysts to derive value from even extremely difficult to process material such as scanned hardcopy documents.

Starlight’s powerful workflow features enable the legal analyst to keep track of their analytical process to not only discover difficult to find information, but also to show how that information was found and to reproduce that process. Starlight’s point-and-click GUI provides a simple to use interface on some of the most sophisticated state-of-the-art technology in the industry today. Whether it is eDiscovery, email analytics, compliance, or IP management, Starlight is a powerful enabling technology that brings new efficiencies to the legal discovery and analysis process.

 

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