2007 Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Privacy and Security May 22, 2007 Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Antonio Sanfilippo

Title: Scenario Construction and Analysis

The ability to support creation and parallel analysis of competing scenarios is perhaps the greatest single challenge for today’s intelligence analysis systems. Dempster-Shafer theory provides an evidentiary reasoning methodology for scenario construction and analysis that offers potential advantages when compared to other approaches such as Bayesian nets as it places less conceptual load on the analyst by not requiring the complete specification of joint probability distributions. We presents a method that can further reduce the conceptual load by taking advantage of hierarchically structured indicators. We describe a novel interface for this layered, Dempster-Shafer evidentiary reasoning approach and demonstrate the utility of this interface with reference to analysis problems focusing on comparing distinct hypotheses.

Antonio Sanfilippo is Chief Scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). His research focus is on Computational Linguistics and Knowledge Technologies with reference to Security Informatics, Bioinformatics, and Cognitive, Social and Behavioral Sciences. Prior to joining PNNL, Dr. Sanfilippo held positions as Director of Research at Textology Inc., SRA International, and LingoMotors Inc. From May 1998 to August 2000, he served as a senior consultant for the Human Language Technologies Unit at the European Commission. While at SHARP Laboratories of Europe from 1992 to 1998, he supervised linguistic development, led the development of new products, and acted as principal investigator on several projects funded by the European Union. Prior to joining SHARP, Dr. Sanfilippo worked as a Research Associate at University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh (UK). Dr. Sanfilippo holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh (UK).