The House passed a bill on Wednesday directing the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to accelerate its efforts to implement automation for GEOINT activities and report progress on such programs, C4ISRnet reported Friday.
The bill requires NGA to brief the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence on its strategy to deploy automated capabilities to enable staff to rapidly process imaging data and conduct related data analyses. NGA must also establish a plan for hiring software engineers, mathematicians and data scientists to support the effort.
According to a report from the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, the agency is failing at providing “adequate resources to integrate new automation techniques which have resulted in years of research into the issue, but limited operation gains during day-to-day imagery processing.†The House and Senate are yet to reconcile differences between their versions of the bill.
