The Pentagon and UMD to launch intel-focused research center

The Defense Department and the University of Maryland have officially launched the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS). The partnership is geared toward furthering intelligence efforts and innovating in the national security arena.

ARLIS will be DOD’s 14th university-affiliated research center, but the only one focused on the security and intelligence communities. It will bolster basic and applied research into human and sociotechnical systems, artificial intelligence, automation and augmentation, advanced computing and emerging technologies.

The center will be designed as a long-term strategic asset for testing and development, conducting research on threats that have exposed defense-critical supply chains and working with government sponsors to perform workflow analysis and mission modeling.

ARLIS applies a human-centered approach to its projects and is working to analyze cognitive security threats like disinformation and insider threats and operationalize artificial intelligence. An ARLIS research project funded by the DOD’s Minerva Research Initiative program, for example, used Facebook and YouTube data to examine how different emotions influence the resharing of content.

"We need human and technological capabilities, and we need to integrate them into our tradecraft,” Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie said.  “ARLIS's applied research is already enabling our enterprise to determine how we can get new technologies into users' hands faster, use these advances to further our current mission needs and protect as well as modernize our technology so that we can anticipate and achieve future mission successes."

This article first appeared on GCN.