Computer Technology Associates (CTA) is a small information technology (IT) business specializing in applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in support of mission-critical operations for government and industrial clients. Since our inception in 1979 we have applied our expertise in cognitive software applications, ontology engineering, and human factors to a broad range of complex electronic data systems problems, initially in the aerospace and intelligence domains, and most recently in the healthcare industry. The company has been repeatedly recognized for its technical strength and innovation in providing customers with operationally effective solutions in all phases of complex systems’ lifecycles. We have enjoyed great success in applying original thought and innovative, advanced concepts to the challenges of real-world problems, resulting in dramatic improvements in operational performance of mission-critical systems in use today.

In the 1990’s CTA artificial intelligence/expert systems technology was used in support of numerous autonomous space systems developed by CTA Space Systems for the DoD and NASA. These onboard flight and associated ground systems typically employed a combination of expert system/rules defined by spacecraft systems experts to be used to monitor and respond to anomalous telemetry sensor data in real-time, and predictive models derived using combinations of orbital mechanics mathematical models and statistical machine learning over ground-based radar/laser/optical tracking systems, to manage spacecraft operations. These early efforts formed the basis of informatics used routinely today in the management of space systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), geostationary satellites used for weather/global communications, high resolution space-borne optical/IR imaging systems used both commercially and by the DoD/Intelligence Community (IC), and the International Space Station (ISS).

Following 9/11 CTA was tasked by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an intelligence community (IC) research center, for the development of an innovative ontological approach to the “Insider Threat” problem. IARPA sponsors high risk, high payoff research designed to produce new technology to address some of the most important and challenging IT problems faced by the IC. Similarly, CTA was tasked by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, as a subcontractor to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), to apply its AI/Intelligent Agents technology towards the “Global Net Centric Surveillance and Targeting System” (GNCST).  GNCST, a highly classified program, was designed to monitor real-time data from globally distributed space/airborne/ground intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) sensors, with advanced analytics (semantics-based data fusion, imagery/free text processing, machine learning and intelligent agents) to generate actionable intelligence in support of IC analysts and warfighters. The primary focus of the effort was to apply AI techniques towards automated upstream fusion of signals from national IC assets to allow earlier association of emitting and non-emitting target signatures yielding higher detection probability while maintaining false-alarm control and high-fidelity identification.

CTA also performed as an “enterprise architecture” support contractor for the DoD TRICARE Management Activity (now the Defense Health Agency) and was tasked to explore the use of HL7 and semantic models to enable the VA and DoD to share computable outpatient pharmacy and medication allergy data between the DoD AHLTA and VA Vista EHR systems. Specifically, we demonstrated our ontology-based data fusion capabilities using a large medical ontology maintained by NIH/NLM (RxNorm) as a semantic mediation terminology that supports semantic interoperation between diverse drug terminologies. Our pilot became the basis for the current Clinical Data Repository (CDR)/Health Data Repository (HDR) (CHDR) still in use today.

This significant CTA history of AI experience is the scientific “know-how” that formed the basis of Vivace Health Solutions and VFusion.

For more information about CTA, please visit www.cta.com.