NRO Sentient Program overview - C05113688

Source: National Reconnaissance Office FOIA release C05113688
Document date: 2012-02-13 classification guide date; approved for release 2019-02-21
URL: https://www.nro.gov/Portals/135/documents/foia/declass/ForAll/051719/F-2018-00108_C05113688.pdf
Captured: 2026-08-10 from the official two-page PDF's indexed text after the NRO host denied direct command-line retrieval
Cited from: ../reddit/grusch-private-nyc-presentation-2024-01
Related article: ../articles/blackvault-nro-sentient-tictac-2023

Extraction note: Obvious OCR errors in classification markings are omitted below. Redacted passages remain marked as redacted. The public portions are reproduced in source order.

Approved for Release: 2019/02/21 C05113688

Sentient Program

Mission

Sentient is an on-going Research and Development (R&D) program, which is managed and operates out of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The program architecture was developed to demonstrate advanced technologies and techniques to revolutionize the current Collection, Processing, Exploitation, and Dissemination (TCPED) cycle across the Intelligence Community (IC). The Sentient methodology represents a fully integrated intelligence approach consisting of three fundamentals: problem-centric intelligence, multi-INT end-to-end, and trusted machine automation.

Features

As intelligence requirements continue to expand and manpower resources decrease, the need for automated tasking and collection is more critical than ever. The R&D Sentient program helps alleviate such constraints by providing the intelligence community with an automated tipping and cueing system. Sentient's architecture delivers activity-based intelligence to customers via alerts, drives automated collection based off feasibility, and provides a visual interface for analysts to interact with the program and understand the automated decisions. In addition, Sentient integrates various tactical and national sensors to support tactical operations and [redacted].

Sentient is comprised of the following components:

Problem Decomposition - The process of discovering and documenting the Essential Elements of Information, signatures and observables, possible collector applicability, [redacted], and targeting strategies to develop Sentient mission threads.
Sensemaking - Develop analytics to automatically fuse multi-INT "big data" in context to understand current activity, predict new activity, and discover unknown activity.
Collection Orchestration - Explore, develop, demonstrate, and transition orchestrated collection and mission-management technologies to enable predictive, responsive, and optimized collection of intelligence.
Informatics & Processing - Apply nontraditional methods to fuse multi-INT object data for [redacted] entity resolution, geolocation, and tracking.
Space Protection - In partnership with the NRO Enterprise, DoD, and IC Space Community, prototype and transition capabilities for space protection, mission assurance, and architecture resilience.

Analyst training

In order to ensure customers are able to leverage Sentient's capabilities, the team offers online videos or hands-on training upon request. Training includes guidance on mission-thread development, creating a Sentient account, monitoring and receiving activity-based-intelligence alerts, and accessing collected imagery.

Program presentations

Sentient program overviews describing the system architecture are provided upon request through IC-Connect, teleconference, video teleconference, or in person near the NRO.

Modernization

[Redacted]