Looking back on 2019, we take great pride in all that our amazing team was able to achieve. We grew our space and hired nearly 30 new staff members, including almost two dozen talented engineers, developers, data scientists and designers. This rapid expansion was the result of continued success in our goals of pioneering visual analytics research for tough, data-driven challenges and offering solutions and products that realize these advancements to help leaders in government and industry understand problems and get answers more quickly.
We continued to grow world-class leadership and recognition in the research community, with a particular focus on augmented intelligence—interfaces for cooperative problem solving by intelligent humans and machines—and augmented reality. Notable events included:
- Receiving recognition by DARPA for our ongoing contribution to leading-edge visual analytics.
- Publishing four peer-reviewed research papers, including “SkyMap”: World-Scale Immersive Spatial Display, which won the Best Poster award at ACM SUI 2019.
- Welcoming a record number of leading academic researchers—including speakers from Microsoft Research, the University of Toronto and Reuters research lab—to discuss their latest work with our technical staff through lunch and learns.
We also continued to enhance our suite of products in order to effect an ever greater impact on the work of our engaged community of partners and users in law enforcement, which in turn helps them better protect those they’re entrusted to assist. Notable milestones in our product work included:
- More than 80 new partner organizations across North America and Europe joined the TellFinder Alliance. In addition, an earlier use of TellFinder to identify a human trafficking network led this year to two successful indictments, and a Florida court admitted TellFinder data as evidence for the first time in a trial that resulted in a sex trafficking conviction.
- Continued expansion of the use of GeoTime globally for crime trend analysis.
We’re looking forward to building on this momentum and having a great 2020, too. Watch this space for more news!