Ports in the United States and around the world could be protected with a threat vulnerability analysis system being developed by a team led by Robert Patton of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The system, called Orion, will find, analyze and fuse information in support of intelligence, security and monitoring operations. "Our goal is to provide a system that can automatically retrieve information about worldwide shipping traffic, correlate this data, detect anomalies and then present this information to an analyst," Patton said. The ORNL technology helps overcome the problem of having to quickly make sense of information from thousands of sources. Patton noted that Orion builds on the lab's work with intelligent agents for the military, intelligence community and Department of Energy. Intelligent agents are software programs that scan the Internet, satellite images and electronic databases worldwide. The research, a collaborative effort between the Computational Sciences & Engineering and Engineering Science & Technology divisions, is funded by ORNL's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.
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