11.2 GRASP

Many years ago, a full decade before the explosion of the Internet, as an analyst for a federal law enforcement agency, I proposed and led a team of programmers in the creation of a system we drolly christened the Gateway Remote Access Service Provider (GRASP). GRASP enabled field agents to access multiple databases in support of their investigations. From that experience, I learned firsthand the problem of connecting and retrieving information from disparate data silos and the endless protocols each required for extracting key intelligence about individuals and business entities. I also learned that simply retrieving the information was not enough; assembling and intelligently analyzing the data was also required, which ironically set me on the path of AI, at first working with expert systems and eventually neural networks and machine learning.