Certified for GEOINT
Written by Harrison Donnelly
GIF 2010 Volume: 8 Issue: 5 (July/August)
USGIF Academic Initiative Helps Meet Booming
Government And Industry Demand For Well-Prepared
Geospatial Intelligence Personnel.
A U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation initiative setting guidelines for academic GEOINT programs is already making a difference in meeting the booming government and industry demand for well-prepared geospatial intelligence personnel.
More than 30 students from three universities accredited by USGIF have so far received University Geospatial Intelligence Certificates, according to Max Baber, the foundation’s academic director.
The three institutions—George Mason University, Penn State Worldwide Campus and the University of Missouri—participate in the program along with the University of Texas at Dallas, which was accredited relatively recently. The number of accredited schools is expected to double by the end of the year, including review of a geospatial intelligence program at one of the service academies.
The certificate programs, which reflect courses of instruction roughly equivalent to an academic “minor” in geospatial intelligence, provide students with a solid background in geospatial science and technology. They get an efficient introduction to the fundamentals of such topics as remote sensing, GIS, geographic visualization and spatial analysis.
But they also offer a “special twist” in the form of an emphasis on critical thinking and exposure to the world of intelligence, said Baber.
“The GEOINT industry currently has more geospatial jobs than the supply of educated personnel,” he explained. “About four years ago, a USGIF academic committee was formed to explore developing university programs with a particular focus on geospatial intelligence. That’s the added value—building an academically oriented GEOINT program on a solid foundation of geospatial science and technology. The twist is to create a capstone experience in the program that is specifically devoted to GEOINT problem solving. Introducing geospatial intelligence to students is what separates USGIF accredited programs from traditional university programs in geospatial science and technology.”
From a higher education perspective, programs such as the USGIF Geospatial Intelligence certificate reflect two major trends as colleges and universities have responded to changes in the overall economy and job market. One is the expansion and development of GIS and geospatial science as an academic discipline, resulting from advances in the technology and also the promising outlook for geospatial jobs in the years ahead. In addition, certificate programs have grown in popularity as a way for students to boost their job credentials, and for institutions to boost their bottom lines.
The unique process by which the accreditation program was created makes it particularly valuable to prospective employers, noted USGIF President Keith Masback. USGIF expert volunteers representing a broad cross-section of industry and government teamed with academics to develop the standards for the program, ensuring that students completing the program have the skills that are immediately applicable to realworld challenges.
“It was imperative that we at USGIF received the buy-in from our members, in both industry and government,” Masback said. “Without understanding what their needs were and where they saw weaknesses in their entry-level hires, USGIF wouldn’t have been able to deliver the strongest possible curriculum guidelines. Employers can be confident in hiring students graduating from a USGIF accredited program, because those new employees ‘will speak GEOINT’ from day one on the job.”
From the perspective of the GEOINT community, however, there also was a need for assured standards and greater focus among the wide diversity of programs. At the same time, there was a sense that other areas and ways of thinking needed to be included.
“Because it involves deriving meaningful intelligence from spatial data and imagery, you also need a broad education so you can think and bring a critical approach to the task. Skills such as image interpretation, feature extraction and spatial analysis are highly sophisticated, requiring broad knowledge bases to help identify significant characteristics in the natural or built environment,” Baber observed.
“We encourage development of multidisciplinary geospatial intelligence certificate programs,” he continued. “We want people to work together and bring knowledge from different domains, whether political science or engineering. We want programs to integrate across disciplines.”
RIGHT-SIZE STANDARDS
The USGIF’s first attempt at setting up guidelines relied heavily on the “Geographic Information Science and Technology Body of Knowledge” produced by the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science and published by the Association of American Geographers in 2006. But Baber and others soon concluded that there was too much emphasis on the GIS side, which is a spatial database approach, and not enough on remote sensing and imagery.
Those latter areas are critically important for geospatial intelligence, Baber suggested, adding, “We have to know what’s going on right now, and the fastest way to do that is to use sensors in different forms to capture images, whether from radar, LiDAR or other technologies.”
Another concern was that the existing standards required a level of information that was more appropriate to a full-fledged degree program, rather than the typically lighter coursework requirements of a collegiate certificate program. “We wanted to adjust the standards to make sure they were right-sized. In some ways, the initial USGIF guidelines were asking for too much information for a certificate rather than degree program,” said Baber, adding that another goal was to make the USGIF accreditation process more comprehensible and manageable for the schools.
Program developers were also clear that they did not want a job training program. “There are fundamental differences between training and education. Training can teach about which buttons to push to attain a result, and education can help you evaluate whether those results are useful or meaningful,” said Baber.
“There’s so much more than which buttons to push involved with this. You need critical and spatial thinking skills. It’s all about bringing data together from different sources and deriving useful information,” he said.
But while they lay out a vision of GEOINT education, the USGIF guidelines allow a lot of leeway to schools to develop their own programs.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” said Baber. “We need people to have critical thinking skills, so we want the universities to have the freedom to develop programs in ways that make sense to them. They have a lot of talent, and there’s more than one way to approach this. We want to make sure they hit the fundamentals, but we don’t want to tell them how to do it. They can organize the details in ways that are meaningful to them. The results will be the same, but the style will vary.”
SERVICE TO ACADEMIA
Participants in the program offered praise for the USGIF guidelines and their impact on academic offerings in geospatial intelligence.
According to Tony Stefanidis, director of George Mason University’s graduate program in geospatial intelligence, the USGIF accreditation process provided the inspiration and guidance for developing what has become a very successful graduate program.
“The foundation provided a great service to academia by identifying the essential elements of knowledge used in geospatial intelligence and needed by the community. While these elements have emerged through years of tradecraft practices, they are deeply rooted in fundamental science and corresponding technological innovations, and are continuously evolving as the science behind them is moving forward. These scientific components were only partially addressed by traditional geospatial education programs, as they may come from a variety of other disciplines,” he said.
“Accordingly, we were presented with the challenge of developing a rather interdisciplinary academic program around the evolving needs of the geospatial intelligence community,” he continued. “In order to do so, we had to extend our offerings towards related academic disciplines and to enhance traditional coursework with advanced critical thinking, and structured analytic principles. Initially this led to the creation of a Graduate Certificate in Geospatial Intelligence, which in turn led to the development of our brand-new MS program in geoinformatics and geospatial intelligence. The new MS degree was approved in May by the State Council for Higher Education of Virginia, and will be offered beginning this fall.
“Student response to our new educational offerings in GEOINT has been extremely positive, with large numbers of quality students enrolling in these programs. The accreditation of our program from USGIF has obviously had an extremely positive effect in our student recruitment efforts. This past May we had our first graduating class of 14 students from our graduate certificate program in geospatial intelligence. As we already have over 100 students registered in our programs, we are looking forward to a very productive and exciting future,” Stefanidis said.
Todd S. Bacastow of Penn State University offered a similar perspective: “We have found the USGIF accreditation and certificate to have an important personal and professional value to our graduates. The certificate recognizes that the individual can apply the tools and techniques of the tradecraft to effectively approach analytic problems. However, most importantly, it is also acknowledgement that the individual has the fundamental understanding of the discipline to advance within the profession.
“My goals/hopes/expectations going forward are that geospatial intelligence be more broadly addressed as knowledge, a process and a profession,” Bacastow added. “In this sense, geospatial intelligence anticipates the human impact of an event or action within a spatiotemporal context. It is knowledge acquired from geospatial data through the application of geospatial techniques and by skilled interpretation. Finally, it is the ability to acquire and present knowledge in a way that is appropriate to the decision-making environment.”
The University of Missouri certificate program in geospatial intelligence provides a range of valuable services to students, the university and society in general, explained Tim Matisziw, director of the MU GeoINT Certificate Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. “Foremost, since our program is explicitly focused on undergrads, it provides them with an early introduction to the GEOINT tradecrafts, ensuring proficiency in skills central to geospatial analysis and problem solving. Further, the program provides a tangible need for geospatial analysis and direct linkage to the geospatial analysis community that is attractive to students assessing degree programs and potential employment prospects.
“The University of Missouri also benefits from this interaction given greater transmission of qualified students to the intelligence sectors. More fundamentally, though, our program serves to enhance awareness of and commitment to geospatial intelligence, as well as ensuring the next generation of GEOINT professionals is well equipped to serve our country,” Matisziw added. ♦