Intelligence Next Generation: Empowering Human Intelligence With AI and ML

A large and arrogant drug cartel operates confidently beneath the radar in a Latin American country. It processes cocaine in colossal quantities, moves it undetected across borders and takes it onto the European street to reap a vast dual harvest of profit and suffering.

Impenetrable for years, the cartel was recently rolled up with the help of a technology platform created by the Israeli data analytics company METIS. "Using a form of artificial intelligence, METIS software sifted through massive amounts of data obtained from police, informers, interrogation transcripts, crime scene forensics, past activity, satellite images, CCTV footage, car license plates and more," says METIS founder and CEO, Natan Bandler.

Identifying patterns that would take the human brain or even a combination of many human brains months or years if at all, METIS technology uncovered the cartel’s modus operandi, showed how money was moved, and how the product was spirited across borders. "By analyzing all relevant information, the platform pinpointed the key role of vehicles in the operation, found where they were stolen, where they were hidden and where they crossed borders," recounts Bandler, an intelligence and cyber expert and serial entrepreneur. "This took investigators to the cartel’s foot soldiers and from them to the drug lords. Warrants were issued and the cartel was dismantled."

That drug bust was a prominent case, but it is one among thousands solved by the METIS platform in the past two and a half years.

"Our purpose at METIS is to democratize AI and automation technologies, and make them accessible to intelligence agencies and law and security enforcement to create a better, safer world," says Bandler. "Whether the target is hate crime, organized crime or financial crime, human trafficking, child exploitation, fraud, drugs or violence, the bad guys aren’t standing still. They’re getting more sophisticated with every day, equipping themselves with computer technologies, drones and even gunships, while police and security departments the world over are constrained by limited budgets, limited resources and limited manpower."

Cutting-edge technology
The METIS system was created for high-end agencies — counterterrorism units, national and homeland security, military and operational intelligence — as an augmented predictive intelligence platform able to expose and prevent hostile activity. This kind of integrated system, driven by an artificial intelligence-machine learning system to solve complex public safety and national security challenges across multiple agencies and systems, was something that Dr. Joseph J. Lestrange sought to build during his years as a public safety executive at the US Department of Homeland Security. Today head of business strategy for METIS-North America, he asserts that "METIS is on the cutting edge of the technology. Putting the talent, experience and tradecraft of the organization at the core, it’s revolutionizing how law enforcement agencies meet increasing demands to leverage their Big Data holdings with technology to resolve today’s complex public safety challenges."

The technology invented by the METIS team is cutting edge, says Bandler. At its heart is augmented intelligence, a subsection of AI, which enhances human intelligence with machine learning and predictive analytics. This, in turn, improves human decision-making and the actions to which the improved decisions lead.

"The information is out there," he says, "but the pace and volume at which it floods in every hour — through social media, telecommunications, video and many other sensors — are well beyond the capacity of any human analyst or agency. We need automated intelligence to trace connections, uncover relationships and identify activities that give us a full picture of what’s happening, allow us to anticipate future threats, and combat those that are current. METIS has combined anticipatory augmented intelligence (providing insights from the data without preparing, processing or analyzing it) with security agency practice, and academic and AI research. To this, we’ve added our own domain expertise, knowledge and passion. The uniqueness of our system is in its multilayered cognitive analytics. Our multidisciplinary team — some 20 data scientists and computer engineers, all with intelligence backgrounds — works together to enable customers to use our advanced tools and algorithms without data scientists."

Increased crime clearance rate
Proving itself with the high-end agencies, the value of the METIS platform to local and regional police forces, law enforcement and public safety departments was quickly recognized as a way of improving policing and making it proactive. As with national security, METIS makes sense of the mass of permissible data, finds connections and indicates changes in patterns and behaviors that reveal wrongdoing, past and potential. Taken to a national level, it can be used for military intelligence, homeland security and cyber intelligence, and to detect financial crime, strategic global threats and detect influence campaigns, filtering the mass of extant information to expose what is being communicated, by whom, to whom and why.

"With the METIS platform, it’s as if you have an army of genius-level analysts, investigators, detectives and intelligence officers working on your cases," says Daniel Moscovici, company cofounder and COO. "Available to security organizations from rural police departments onward, it functions as a single brain providing a vastly better intelligence picture at a speed never seen before. With global terror on the increase and hundreds of thousands of crimes unsolved each year worldwide, it’s a technology whose time has very much come."

Unprecedented results, available to all
With some crimes escaping discovery because police departments are underfunded and understaffed, others because their perpetrators access high-level technology to hide themselves and their assets, the METIS platform is already increasing the criminal solve-rate, a trend which can only increase, says Bandler. "Based on the evidence, targets, secrets and meanings it uncovers, the METIS platform tells law enforcement and intelligence officers and agencies what else they should be looking at and what they should investigate next. It helps them understand developing trends and enables them to make better use of their resources to prevent crime and terror. It gives them a complete picture of what’s happening now, what’s missing and what’s next, empowering them to take action and get the results they want."

While the reality in each country differs, METIS has created a "flexible solution for constantly changing world, reeling under terror, pandemic, instability and economic distress," says Bandler. "We have customers on every continent. In the US, we’re currently building a North American team. A new project has just been launched the US, with the METIS platform used against hate crime, from bullying all the way to mass shootings. It is fed with models of earlier hate crimes, threat detection research, cybersphere posts and more, and searches for patterns — very much in line with the METIS vision of a safer, more secure world. Not only is METIS technology far superior to that of other companies in the field, it also allows its clients apply to apply technology in their own context without a long, expensive and sensitive customization project.

In collaboration with METIS