IXMATCH WINS U.S. OSD SBIR COUNTER-TERRORISM CONTRACT

SBIR Phase I Award to Enhance iXmatch’s State-of-the-Art Search Software

MINNEAPOLIS - February 17, 2004 -- iXmatch Inc., a leading provider of advanced search software, today announced it has been awarded a Phase I contract from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) program. The objective is to track terrorists by identifying hidden information within intercepted messages and intelligence reports.

From the SBIR solicitation: “Leaders searching for information from large heterogeneous data sources, such as collections of intercepted messages or fragmentary intelligence reports, confront an important and difficult problem. The modern battlespace is a complex, rapidly changing, uncertain environment. With every event in a battlespace, there is an associated uncertainty. The uncertainty of an event or combination of events changes with time. In addition, the uncertainty of potentially important events cannot be assessed in isolation. Instead, uncertainty is judged in relation to other events that have, are happening, or may happen in various locations. Decision-making requires a complex model, not currently available to commanders. Novel techniques that integrate information from multiple sources, and properly account for uncertainty of information are required. The state-of-the-art in search technology (keywords; Boolean combinations; Bayesian probabilities) is far from perfect and not very effective for targets that are ‘trying to hide’ by either using unfamiliar terminology or intentionally misusing common terminology. Unfortunately, both situations are common in terrorist communiqués. For such tasks, substantive improvements in search technology that incorporate assessments of ambiguity and uncertainty are urgently needed.

“Searching for information with available search technology is analogous to thinking of one town where an enemy might be hiding, dropping down on it, then, if empty, trying another town of the same or similar name or size, no matter how far away. The reason for this awkward hit-and-miss approach is that all current search engines use one of three methods. They either: (1) try to match one or a few words in a query with the same few words in the quarry (keywords); (2) look in the places where the greatest number of other people have looked (probabilities); or (3) have humans categorize the kinds of places that targets of interest are most likely to be (Bayesian). However, in the physical world a skilled hunter, whenever possible, tracks the quarry, follows its spoor from place to place, paying close attention to the direction of movement, tracing by multiple clues from cooler leads to hotter.

“To do the same sort of hunting in the information world, a search technology needs to be able to relate documents or messages to each other not just by a few selected words, but by anything that ties them together; that is, all of their contained ‘meanings’, no matter what words they are expressed in. One could then examine particular relations between the current neighborhood and surrounding areas in the ‘meaning space’ and follow trails based on any clues that come to light.”

Drs. George Karypis and Eui-Hong (Sam) Han, iXmatch’s scientists, are world-renowned experts in the technology areas required to solve this problem, including advanced search, information retrieval, data fusion, text clustering and pattern discovery. “This is an exciting award for iXmatch,” said Dr. Han. “The challenges faced by the intelligence community today are a perfect fit for the work Dr. Karypis and I have been doing for years. We’re honored to have the opportunity to help the OSD’s counter-terrorism efforts.”

Business analysts at large corporations feel the same pain as intelligence analysts. Disparate business units must share information with each other, but the data is owned and independently maintained by each unit. iXmatch’s advanced search software allows them to identify contextually relevant information from all areas of their businesses. “Commercial enterprises have vast amounts of data and are extremely interested in locating relevant information in a timely manner,” said Prakash Puram, iXmatch President and CEO. “They want search results that are relevant to their users, because poor results have a negative impact on their business. Our unique search capabilities provide a solution and create a tremendous amount of value for our customers.”