SPECIAL REPORT: DHS technology getting more of a human touch

Before the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate's Human Factors Division decides to send a new technology into the field, it first gets reviewed by a panel of experts.

This is not your typical committee made up of software engineers or technology security specialists, but rather a cross section of professionals looking at a variety of aspects of the technology's impact.

"The Community Perceptions of Technology panel is where we bring civil rights advocates, human factors psychologists, ethicists and others to discuss the technology," says Sharla Rausch, director of the Human Factors division. "The panel consists of about 15 people who review everything from health and safety issues to the unintended consequences of the technology to what happens if the technology is comprised to privacy and civil rights issues."

The panel submits its findings to the division, which then uses the report to develop a roadmap forward, Rausch says.

"We had program managers say they didn't think of all those things the panel brought up," she says. "The program managers are very focused on having effective technology, but sometimes we lose sight on how those technologies are perceived and if they are not accepted by the people they are used on, then you don't have an effective tech."

Rausch says that DHS runs about three to four panels a year for different technologies, and plans on moving them to the front end of the development process, instead of the back end where it is now.

She says DHS also has run panels internationally with Canada on northern border technology, and plans to hold a joint panel with the United Kingdom on biometrics in the coming months.

"We've had one technology that in fact the program manager walked out and said 'we are not going there, and we will take another approach,'" Rausch says. "Or we've learned not to use specific terms, like radiation, because people perceive it to mean something negative."

This panel is important as the Human Factors office is trying to help law enforcement officials get into the brains of terrorists, or other bad guys.

"Our work basically boils down to all thing human," she says. "Why people engage in violent extremism? We try to identify suspicious behavior. We are interested in biometrics, community preparedness and resilience issues and human factors. How to make technology more effective? And how do you make it more acceptable to the public?"

The office awards its $12.5 million budget through competitive grants, broad agency announcements and the small business innovation research program (SBIR).

Rausch says her office also manages another almost $40 million in projects in other divisions of DHS.

All of this is done with a staff of 14 federal employees and five contractors.

"We have people here who have a team approach as their philosophy," she says. "People are not locked in to program areas just because they have an expertise. We have a number of psychologists, social psychologists, sociologists, culture anthropologists, physicists and we are adding a statistical modeler. When we get a new program or project, I encourage the staff to sit down together because they all benefit from each others' perspective."

Rausch says the mix of projects offer short and long terms benefits. For instance, the division validated different suspicious behavior indicators and gave them to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) so they could be added to the training and simulation program.

Another project for validating indicators for violent extremism is just getting off the ground and will take longer to feed to intelligence analysts and into modeling programs.

Still another project tries to help law enforcement officers understand micro facial leakages. Rausch says she cannot go into too much detail for security reasons, but it could be simple of as a crook of an eyebrow as a alerting an officer that someone needs to be questioned further.

"We are looking at suspicious behavior detection techniques where certain behaviors in a specific context would be anomalous," she says. "We want behavior detection officials to look for these and understand how they correlate with specific types of activities."

Rausch adds that the end goal is to have an automated system where it would give the law enforcement official a red, yellow or green light to indicate whether the screener needs to ask more questions.

A third project looks at helping federal air marshals get more restful sleep and become more alert when they are awake. The program, called Brain Music, plays classical music while the marshal is asleep.

"Brain Music uses the individual's own neuro feedback when in a rested state," she says. "The goal is to figure out how can we help them get into better state of alert or rested state."

DHS is testing the concept now and Rausch says they should have results by the end of the summer.

"Everything we doing here is a tool to support the operational people," she says. "Human factors are important in all the work we do and as we develop indicators and signatures, those are things they would use in sifting through the large amount of information to make sense of it all."

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