Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a contract supporting the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in the Scientific advances to Continuous Insider Threat Detection (SCITE) Program. IARPA’s program seeks to develop and test methods for detecting insider threats, which are security risks originating from individuals with malicious intentions within an organization. The one-year contract is valued over $1.25 million, with two options, if exercised, for an additional $2.5 million.

As part of the SCITE program, Charles River Analytics has assembled a team that includes Assured Information Security, Applied Marketing Science, and Cognitio. The team will develop models in the Probabilistic Relational Inference Modeling for Enterprises effort, known as PRIME.

“In PRIME, we’re developing tools to create and use probabilistic models of inference enterprises  that can be used to evaluate and forecast the performance of enterprise-level inference processes, such as detecting personnel conducting industrial espionage in large corporations,” said Dr. Brian Ruttenberg, Senior Scientist at Charles River and Principal Investigator on the PRIME effort. “Using these tools, information technologists, analysts, or other decisions makers in an organization can assess and evaluate inference enterprises and choose the most effective solution for a given domain. PRIME will also provide the capability to propose new and novel inference enterprises, providing effective solutions at a fraction of the cost and with greater assurance than engineered systems.”

Charles River will build probabilistic relational models of inference enterprises in PRIME using the Figaro™ probabilistic programming language. Figaro is a free, open-source language for probabilistic modeling.