According to the website, MITRE is:
a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.
All of this is interesting because BlogsOfWar points out that they’ve been presenting information on a project titled BlogINT: Weblogs as a Source of Intelligence (with slides in PDF format):
We will collect high volumes of information from weblogs and traditional television and Web-based news media. To characterize content, we will compare weblogs and traditional media using the method developed in MITRE’s Retrospective Source Analysis project. We will build spatio-temporal models of events from weblogs and compare these to ground truth for another assessment of accuracy, level of detail, and value.
The presentation is part of MITRE’s 2005 Annual Technology Symposium held at their campuses in Massachusetts and Virginia. The McLean event was April 13th, but the Bedford event isn’t until May 5th.
I wonder if I can still get tickets?