This paper reports on methods and results of an applied research project by a team consisting of SAIC and four universities to develop, integrate, and evaluate new approaches to detect the weak signals characteristic of insider threats on organizations' information systems. Our system combines structural and semantic information from a real corporate database of monitored activity on their users' computers to detect independently developed red team inserts of malicious insider activities. We have developed and applied multiple algorithms for anomaly detection based on suspected scenarios of malicious insider behavior, indicators of unusual activities, high-dimensional statistical patterns, temporal sequences, and normal graph evolution. Algorithms and representations for dynamic graph processing provide the ability to scale as needed for enterprise-level deployments on real-time data streams. We have also developed a visual language for specifying combinations of features, baselines, peer groups, time periods, and algorithms to detect anomalies suggestive of instances of insider threat behavior. We defined over 100 data features in seven categories based on approximately 5.5 million actions per day from approximately 5,500 users. We have achieved area under the ROC curve values of up to 0.979 and lift values of 65 on the top 50 user-days identified on two months of real data.

The Passive A-Band Wind Sounder (PAWS) project is funded through NASA's Instrument Incubator Program (IIP). The objective of PAWS is to demonstrate an instrument concept for measuring wind speed profiles in the troposphere using Doppler shifts in selected oxygen absorption lines. PAWS is a daytime-only approach, but has the potential to provide better wind data than is currently available with significantly lower cost, risk, and platform requirements than lidar. This paper will provide an overview of the PAWS approach and progress on the instrument development.

NASA's Earth Science Technology office has funded an effort to advance the technology of interferometric ranging in Low Earth Orbit. The goal of this work is to reduce risk for a follow-on gravity mission to the gravity recovery and climate experiment (GRACE) by demonstrating performance of a heterodyne interferometric laser ranging instrument appropriate for a follow-on gravity mission to GRACE at the NASA Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 6, with traceability to the ranging error budget of a strawman flight design of the interferometric ranging system.