NORA+system

Systems Research & Development (SRD) developed its Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA) technology to help casinos identify cheaters by correlating information from multiple sources about relationships and earlier transactions .

Las Vegas-based SRD, which received funding from the CIA, is now developing several NORA plug-ins to reach further into the world of criminals and terrorists. Last month, the company unveiled a "degrees of separation" capability that finds deeper connections among people.

"It will tell you that the Drug Enforcement Agency's agent's college roommate's ex-wife's current husband is the drug lord," says Jeff Jonas, chief technology officer at SRD. NORA can bridge up to 30 such links, he says.

The new NORA module uses streaming technology that scans data and extracts information in real time as it flows by. That would allow it to, for example, instantly discover that a man at an airline ticket counter shares a phone number with a known terrorist and then issue an alert before he can board his flight. Jonas calls it "perpetual analytics," to distinguish it from periodic queries against an occasionally updated database.
 * [[image:http://www.computerworld.com/computerworld/records/images/story/16KCanalytics_raghavan_seco.jpg width="140" height="180" caption="Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity Inc."]] || [[image:http://www.computerworld.com/computerworld/images/1pixclear.gif width="5"]] ||
 *  Prabhakar Raghavan, CTO at Verity Inc.  || [[image:http://www.computerworld.com/computerworld/images/1pixclear.gif width="5"]] ||

SRD is also developing the concept of "cascading" NORA data warehouses for really big problems.

For example, Jonas says, each airline might have a copy of NORA processing its passenger data and sending the summarized results to a midtier NORA system at the Federal Aviation Administration. Car rental agencies might send their NORA results to a rental car association. And the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service could collect data from ports of entry.

All three midtier NORA systems would then send transactions to the top-tier system at the Office of Homeland Security in Washington. They would communicate with one another in a "zero administration" arrangement in which rules and filters would determine whether a piece of information got passed up or down the chain, Jonas says. **Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)** //Systems Research & Development’s NORA technology can take information from disparate sources about people and their activities and find obscure, nonobvious relationships. For example, it might discover that an applicant for a job at a casino shares a telephone number with a known criminal and issue an alert to the hiring manager.//

by : HADEEL NIZAR OBEED.....