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Musical Face Match

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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During my summer internship at Novetta, I developed a prototype that can match a person’s face with the musician whom they most closely resemble, then play a song by that musician. This project was fun, but is also a great demonstration of a highly adaptable concept: face recognition from a live video feed triggering an action based on a specific identification. Development In planning this prototype, I knew I would need to leverage Amazon’s suite of developer applications. My background is in applied mathematics, so I needed to familiarize myself with that platform. Once I learned how the services communicated...

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A Face Recognition Prototype with a Twist

Deploying Advanced Machine Learning Models at Scale

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Novetta is using deep learning to automate advanced analytic pipelines for our customers. These new capabilities identify important pieces of information across large text, image, and video data sets, a challenge faced by many of our Defense and Intelligence Community customers.  We developed Argo, a standardized, Docker-based model training and deployment pipeline, to enable rapid evaluation and deployment of state-of-the-art deep learning models. Argo enables models to be deployed as endpoints and, when used with Amazon SageMaker, it forms the foundation for us to deploy, scale, and manage our deep learning models. Simplifying infrastructure setup through Docker and AWS allows...

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Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Novetta Mission Analytics

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /

by Rhys O’Neill, Jonas Eno-Van Fleet

The ongoing Ebola outbreak in eastern DRC has caused 1,522 deaths, making it the second largest in history. Understanding the causes and expressions of deep-seated local resistance to international response efforts is essential to shortening the outbreak and saving lives. Novetta is providing hands-on analysis via subject matter experts to our partners in the Ebola response community through the classification and analysis of sentiment and voice share in hyper-local and regional media content originating in the North Kivu Ebola hotspot. Novetta’s analysts identify distinct narratives and vectors of propagation from the voices of citizens, civil society stakeholders, Ebola response leadership,...

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How data analysis is helping mitigate the second largest outbreak in history.

PIPPIN: A Public IP Inspector Capability for AWS

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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‘White hat’ penetration testing, which allows for better understanding and mitigation of system vulnerabilities, starts with full insight into your organization’s publicly accessible systems. Across multiple accounts, services, and regions, there is no standard report available in AWS to quickly and efficiently provide this information.  We created a public IP inspector, PIPPIN, to address this challenge using the AWS Application Programming Interface (API). This post walks through our process of discovering and cataloging an organization’s publicly accessible systems and our results with PIPPIN.    Defining your Public IP Landscape You first need to collect AWS Account IDs, a twelve digit...

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20% Accuracy Bump in Text Classification with ME-ULMFiT

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /

by Matt Teschke, Brian Sacash, Ethan Gumabay

Introduction In a previous post, we discussed an enhanced method of passing additional data to the ULMFiT1 algorithm for unstructured text classification, which improved accuracy by up to 9%. In follow-on experiments, we have demonstrated that this approach – in which we prepend metadata to the text to provide more information to the model – increased accuracy by up to 20%, in relative terms. This improvement required just a few lines of Python, such that the performance boost comes at essentially no cost. This blog post explains the findings of this more-detailed evaluation, where we have compared how the following...

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Training an ML Model on the Show Floor: Rapid Prototyping at AWS PSS

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

by Ben West, Brian Sacash

  AWS PSS attendees interact with Novetta’s Machine Learning Prototype demo on the show floor.   Introduction In our previous blog post, Sharpening the Edge with IoT, ML, and Homomorphic Encryption, we discussed our prototype application with the following functionality: Identify when a simulated license plate (alphanumeric characters on a white card) appeared in a live video stream Extract text from the license plate card using Amazon Rekognition Securely search an encrypted watchlist for this text Return any matches to the user Novetta and Enveil demonstrated this prototype at AWS Public Sector Summit, June 11-12. This blog post is an...

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Enriching Entities In Your Data Lake

Category: Advanced Analytics / Big Data and Entity Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Overview Many of our customers have incredible amounts of data scattered across their organization. They know hidden information is locked away, but they need ways to integrate that information and bring it to bear on their missions. One approach to data management is to bring all your data to one place by implementing a data lake – centralizing and storing structured and unstructured information in disparate data sets together. Data lakes drive additional insights into your entire data holdings, enriching the full picture and enabling uncovery of previously unknown links. Storing raw data alongside the results of derived analytics and...

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Sharpening the Edge with IoT, ML, and Homomorphic Encryption

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Edge compute capabilities are central to many of our customers’ missions, and are only growing in importance. For complex workloads like field forensics or digital media triage, we are seeing an increasing need to use machine learning models to process data where it is being collected. Novetta is pairing our advanced analytics, machine learning, and IoT capabilities with Enveil’s ZeroReveal™ technology through a strategic alliance. Using homomorphic encryption, Enveil’s technology allows sensitive information to be securely processed in unsecure environments, allowing data to be searched or analyzed while it is still encrypted. The data security startup’s core technology was developed...

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An interactive demo at AWS Public Sector Summit • Washington, D.C. June 11-12

Deep Learning for Language Identification on Audio Signals

Category: Advanced Analytics / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /  /  /  /  /

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Introduction Speech-to-text transcription is an important tool for mission analytics and many natural language processing tasks. In most cases, a language is manually preset before speech-to-text transcription can be applied. For scenarios where data is being aggregated in large quantities in various languages, automatic language detection capabilities would greatly streamline data processing. Novetta has developed a technique, Language Identification For Audio Spectrograms (LIFAS), that uses spectrograms of raw audio signals as input to a convolutional neural network (CNN) to be used for language identification. This approach requires minimal pre-processing, as raw audio signals are input into the neural network and...

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My Experience With Deep Learning For Coders – Part II

Category: Advanced Analytics / Life At Novetta / Novetta Nexus Tag(s):  /  /  /

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This Spring, Novetta sponsored a Diversity Fellowship at the University of San Francisco’s Data Institute for the Deep Learning Part II course led by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas, the co-founders of fast.ai. We were happy to support Shawn Tsosie, a veteran who loves deep learning and fast.ai as much as we do. You can hear from him below in his own words describing why he took the course and what he hopes to do with what he learned.   My wife, Claire, had gone into labor with our first child the day this course began. I planned on missing...

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