The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences is an eight-year-old partnership between the National Security Agency and North Carolina State University that says it aims to bring together people from business, academia, and government to help the intelligence community solve its “most pressing challenges related to national security and technology.” A collaboration in 2016, for example, used information from buses and trains to alert officials at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro to potential safety issues for athletes and spectators during protests.
A team of outside researchers studied the lab and has published a book about the multidisciplinary collaboration. “Our interest was, ‘How well does this actually work in the wild?’” says co-author Kathleen Vogel, deputy director of the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.
