A preview by Adam Leach, Vice President of Research & Development, of some of the new features and capabilities that will be included in the upcoming summer release, as presented at the i2 User and Training Conference North America last week.
Last week I attended the i2 User and Training Conference North America in Alexandra, Virginia. It proved to be a fantastic couple of days, and it was great to meet so many of our customers and partners in person – something I no longer take for granted!
I had the pleasure of taking part in the keynote on the first day sharing the stage with Jamie Caffrey, i2's Executive Vice President, and Julian Midwinter, i2's Vice President of Sales. I used the opportunity to give attendees a sneak peek of what's coming in our summer release and some key capabilities that will follow.
Our mission is to make the job of an intelligence analyst easier. We know that in today's world that means managing a flood of data from many disparate sources, and having the tools to cut through the noise and get to insights faster. Therefore, our focus over the last few months has been listening to our customers and improving the user experience and performance of our flagship product, i2 Analyst's Notebook.
First, we have improved the capacity of our charts and vastly improved the amount of data that can be modelled on the chart surface.
But that's just the beginning, we have also introduced new tools to make spotting patterns within chart data easier. Specifically, we are introducing new selection tools that allow selections based on entity type, for example, by organisation, vehicle, or person. This is further enhanced with the ability with a single click to select all singleton entities (entities with no links). When used in conjunction with chart summarisation, this can significantly reduce chart clutter and allow you to focus on what's important.
We have also introduced a new highlighter tool. It now has the ability to spotlight entities (or groups of entities) independent of the selection, and keeps the focus on the spotlighted entities as you pan and zoom across the chart surface.
List Data Records have also improved and now feature a flexible tabular view of chart data, with the ability to filter by one or more columns, so similar items can be grouped together for further analysis. In addition, the table can be searched with free text to get to items of interest quicker.
At i2 we understand that analysts do not work alone. We want to continually improve the collaborative capability of our tools and so we are introducing the ability to share data between any analyst whether that be if they are using our desktop or web client.
In i2 Analyst Notebook 10, an analyst will be able to make a selection on their chart, and in just two clicks create a URL that can be shared via email, Slack, Teams, WhatsApp or whatever their organisation uses. This new feature will allow the recipient to receive the same data set, whilst retaining key style elements. It's copy and paste between colleagues for i2 chart data.
We are also continuing to align the user experience between our desktop and web clients. i2 Analyst Notebook 10 will introduce 360 View into the desktop app*. The roots of 360 View were in the popular i2 Investigate add-on which was then brought into i2 Notebook and is now being integrated into the desktop.
360 View provides immediate curated answers to the most asked questions from your data repositories and can be customised to specific user roles within your organisation, for example, an analyst will have different questions compared to frontline investigators.
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We are also continuing to improve the capability of i2 Notebook, our web client, we have introduced two powerful views called List Records and Explore.
List Records provides the power of list records in the web client with a familiar experience for desktop users.
Explore will allow users to filter and drill into the data on their chart based on type and property values. Both views are synchronised so making or changing your selection within List Records, will update the Explore and chart selection.
In addition, analysts can now export charts from i2 Notebook to PDF and directly from List Records into Excel – enabling analysts to easily create content for their intel packages.
We know that the data you need isn’t necessarily stored within your i2 repositories, and you need to connect to varied data sources both internal and external to your organisation.
i2's online services provide rapid access to curated OSINT, global identity data, and public records via cloud-hosted connectors to external services. Minimal setup is required and will initially be available in the United States and Europe.
As you can see, there are lots of new and powerful features to look forward to in i2 Analyst Notebook 10. Beyond release 10, I also previewed some key capabilities that will be featured in following releases.
Generative AI and the latest development in chatbots like ChatGPT have changed users’ expectations in many ways including how they expect to interact with applications At i2, we want to provide these advanced experiences to our users without introducing complex issues of data sovereignty.
Using the power of our own language model, which incidentally can understand over 200 languages, I demonstrated the use of natural language to query the chart data which kept the data entirely within i2 Analyst Notebook.
Finally, I introduced our enhanced Person Identity Management (PIM) solution, again using the i2 TextChart engine, to match and disambiguate names in over 200 languages. It uses transliteration to find matches regardless of language and will form the basis of our next generation of fusion capabilities.
- Adam Leach, Vice President of Research & Development
Disclaimer
i2 Group statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at i2 Group's sole discretion. Information regarding potential future products is intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information mentioned regarding potential future products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. Information about potential future products may not be incorporated into any contract. The development, release, and timing of any future features or functionality described for our products remain at our sole discretion.