Innovation plays a critical role in helping the GEOINT community create better information and insights for decision-makers.

However, as innovation is complex, often fast moving, and at times challenging to gain adoption – the community can benefit from a dedicated group of individuals/platform who support exploration and discussion of future concepts to create pathways for emerging commercial technologies that are embraced by government.

In mid-2014, to help achieve these goals, the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) established the Innovation Task Force to provide innovative ideas and speed up technology adoption,

Thermopylae Sciences & Technology (TST) has the privilege of playing a key role in this task force with AJ Clark, President, serving as a co-chair.

“We want to promote awareness of those [open-source] technologies and expose new generations of developers to the GEOINT Community by building on [the technology] and seeing the functionality and analysis available,” said Clark in a recent Trajectory Magazine article about the task force.

As the article highlights, the task force aims to host quarterly events featuring promising capabilities, open-source software, and open data.  The events may include an interactive challenge for geospatial developers and engineers as well as demonstrations hosted by USGIF members ranging in topics from cloud computing to UAVs.

The Innovation Task Force will help engineers, analysts, and researchers describe their technical capabilities to the broader GEOINT Community, and provide quarterly briefings to senior leaders within the Intelligence Community.  It will also be a forum to organize individuals in Government and Industry that are looking for like minded change agents to collaborate with and share ideas.

Clark serves as monthly contributor to got geoint?, USGIF’s highly popular blog.  In a recent post, Clark discussed parallels between K12 education and producing contextual data for decision-makers.  He also highlighted how human beings are visual learners and that we continually need to turn raw data into “visual art.”

Innovation is the backbone for the growth and success of the GEOINT Community. As such, TST looks forward to helping advance innovation in ways that continually make geospatial intelligence the foundation for all decision-making.