By Nilesh Shah, PhD, Data Scientist Fellow, ManTech

ManTech’s Analytics, AI & Automation (A3) Expertise Combined with our Mission & Enterprise IT (M/EIT) Experience Deliver Game-Changing Results for a Critical Homeland Defense Agency

Since 2017, ManTech has supported an important U.S Department of Homeland Security agency with analytics and business intelligence support services. These services support the agency’s essential work. 

Nilesh Shah
Nilesh Shah, Data Scientist Fellow, ManTech

Recently, we extended and expanded our partnership with this customer to involve evaluating emerging analytics and enterprise IT tools, counseling on their adoption, and advising the agency as it works to implement them. 

The Challenge:

On a typical day, more than one million international travelers cross America’s borders alongside 74,000 shipping or cargo containers. The mission, combined with the volume of cross-border traffic, relies on using sophisticated and emerging technologies that enable the real-time detection of threats. The agency needs the capacity to identify and evaluate these technologies, as well as the expertise to deploy and manage them – all while carrying out its mission.

The Solution:

Today, ManTech is deploying our Analytics, Automation, and Artificial Intelligence (A3) capabilities to identify and leverage tools that will help the agency pinpoint emerging threats in real time. We identify technical solutions, perform conceptual design, and develop and deploy models to support the agency’s threat analysis and targeting work. This is one part of a layered targeting strategy that enables the agency to trigger rapid-fire responses that involve intervening and apprehending dangerous actors.

Specifically, we offer end-to-end analytic support based on intelligence analysis from increasing volumes of data from multiple, disparate sources. We use predictive modeling via machine learning to support a broad scope of targeting missions such as biometrics, image classification, and named entity extraction, as well as entity resolution. Our teams also conduct all-source threat research alongside queries into the agency’s data repositories. With this data, we develop advanced visualizations that translate complex data findings into actionable intelligence for agency officers working to identify the intent, threat level, and precise location of targets.

Adversaries are constantly changing tactics, and the success of the agency’s mission depends upon continued innovation. We use the ManTech Analytic Center as a proving ground for new technologies and innovative research and development. There we incubate new use cases, test and evaluate new tools, and, in partnership with the agency, assess their capabilities against mission use cases. We are a trusted advisor to this customer, providing them with a dedicated team that is strategic, forward thinking, and works side-by-side with their officers and analysts to employ advanced analytics capabilities that address pressing national security threats.

The Impact:

ManTech has helped the agency stay current and well-informed about rapid advancements in technology – specifically around predictive modeling, AI/ML and related software development. We have implemented tools that help them better leverage enterprise-scale data of many types and formats. We’ve researched cloud technologies and designed architectures for cloud migration, including whether certain models should remain on premise or whether the agency should pursue a hybrid solution.

Recently, we built upon a customer-approved innovation roadmap and developed a suite of A3 capabilities within the agency itself. We helped to implement a unified analytic data platform and leveraged our Mission and Enterprise IT (M/EIT) expertise to build an Open Microservices Enterprise Framework (OMEF) and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, as well as all the necessary infrastructure support. We developed reproducible workflow solutions using comprehensive model development lifecycle processes for building AI/ML-powered tools and deploying them in production environments.  Our processes also create reusable data libraries that provide a volume of well-curated targeting features that enrich modeling work and reduce model-refresh cycle times.

As a result of ManTech’s work, this important DHS agency is better prepared to execute its mission and use every available resource to combat threats poised to do our nation harm. Looking ahead, the team is working on an enterprise AI solution to further support end-to-end data preparation, visualization, machine learning, governance​, and collaboration as an integrated workflow. We are also using an open-source data repository that allows us to catalog and index data and metadata. Finally, the team is also working with the first real-time, AI-based entity resolution tool, which will improve named entity identification, matching, and data augmentation to enhance targeting and vetting.

At ManTech, we believe it is our responsibility to deliver innovative, well-architected solutions to our customers because, as in this case, doing so helps safeguard our nation and its borders.

To learn more about ManTech’s A3 and M/EIT capabilities, please visit: ContactUs.mantech.com