Open Source Intelligence Support to Israel-Gaza Conflict
As a national center of excellence, NCDMPH must leverage the advanced technological capabilities of the Nation’s premier academic and research institutions to support our federal partners and the interagency, particularly during humanitarian crises. At the onset of the conflict in Gaza, we partnered with the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to employ their capabilities in generative Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models to conduct a daily search of all available worldwide Open-Source Intelligence and gather public health and medical information related to the crisis. Pulling information from news sources, embassies, the UN, and other organizations, the APL team was able to compress a process that would take hundreds of analysts several days into a handful of analysts over several minutes, and produce a semi-automated summary the National Center team was able to quickly review, edit, and disseminate to decision makers at the Department of Health and Human Services, the Joint Staff, and other key stakeholders. Additionally, the APL team was able to process commercial imagery data of selected medical facilities impacted by the conflict, and using images collected prior to and subsequent to the start of the conflict, produce impact assessments for distribution by the National Center to our partners across the federal government.