The power of the 4th dimension

Adding time as a controlled variable amplifies the power of analytics

This content is provided by Teradata.

A common concept in business is “the time value of money,” that money available right now is actually worth more than the same amount of money at any point in the future because it can earn interest in the interim.

A similar concept applies for our customers in the national security space – the time value of information. The fresher the information, the closer it is obtained to the decision-making, the more valuable it is. And the more information there is, tracking back over a longer period of time, the more useful it becomes.

That’s the premise of Teradata’s 4D Analytics platform, adding the dimension of time to three-dimensional geospatial data, especially important in edge computing applications, and bringing that power to bear in our most important national security and defense missions.

“Think of a camera taking two pictures – as the difference in time between those two pictures grows, you have to make assumptions about what happened in between,” said Mark Powers, solution architect manager, National Security (Americas), Teradata Government Systems LLC. “But a movie camera allows you to move forward and backward to eliminate gaps. For our national security customers, adding time as a controlled variable enables them to make better command decisions. The analysis is based on a more complete analytical fabric.”

The advent of the Internet of Things means the creation of data has grown exponentially; adding the dimension of time accelerates that explosion, but it also provides another dimension for analytics, which helps control and direct the flow of information, Powers added.

“In some cases, our national security customers have collected so much data that the answers are often hiding in plain sight,” he said. The notion that they have the answers in hand, but just can’t find them, is what keeps most mission commanders awake at night.

Combining the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning within the analytics platform means it is possible to drill down to the “unknown unknowns,” the important facts or relationships or events that previously would have remained unsuspected and undiscovered.

“Everything we learn is an opportunity to refine everything we know. Curiosity is expensive, but if you can refine questions on the fly, without creating a new, complex query, if you have a tool that can provide data along a continuum, that’s far less costly,” he said. “When you’re doing it right, the questions almost craft themselves – once you see the results, the next question to ask is almost obvious, or better yet, answers are revealed without even asking.”

The Teradata Analytics Platform facilitates analysis in near-real time which results in a shorter time to mission value – as the data arrives, the analysis is being done. It also means legacy data can be included in the analysis to add context and relevant insight rather than noise.

“Since its inception, the Teradata database was built for the purpose of analysis,” he said. “One design feature is to identify and optimize warm and hot data, and to not be distracted by cold data. The heat of the data changes based on the nature of the analytics you happen to be running.”

The goal in analytics is to refine the data to the point of prediction. “You can’t get to anticipatory answers until you look at trends,” Powers said. “That’s why the time element is so important, so you can predict what’s going to happen next. And machine learning and AI gives you the opportunity to refine the questions and obtain answers based on trends.”

Alerts triggered by the flow of data also have increased value, whether identifying anomalies that have been shown in the past to be significant or flagging a departure from trend.

“You can set specific parameters for things that are expected to happen, and if the system detects a deviation, it sends an alert that could result in automated initiation of a specific action,” Powers explained. “Or it could be that when a certain alert, a certain analytic, occurs, then monitoring what happens next is automatically in the queue. That’s what it means for data to arrive with answers in hand.”

In many national security environments, the collection process and the analysis process have been seen as two separate things.

“What’s happening now is that the business of collection and that of analysis are becoming one thing. That means the analysts have the ability to refine what is being collected to obtain more focused (and even predictive) answers. That’s a good thing,” Powers said. “This type of capability results in the ultimate weapon system, because you can dismantle the enemy’s ability to wage war before it is even a consideration.”

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