For over 25 years, Haystax has been the provider of world-class commercial software products for direct use by individuals in the agencies charged with protecting our communities, cities, and country. Thus, our product is one of the most widely deployed risk management software solutions, used by school, law enforcement, fire, emergency management, and other government agencies across the United States.

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Haystax for School Safety

Haystax meets the constantly evolving challenges of providing safe learning environments for students, faculty, staff, and local security partners by integrating all vital incident and school facility information into a single, online platform.  Physical assessments and behavioral assessments along with the ability to report and monitor incidents on or near campus are hallmarks of Haystax for School Safety.  Know your threats sooner, respond faster, and effectively coordinate actions for all stakeholders.

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Haystax for Public Safety

Law enforcement professionals are called upon daily to perform a broad range of tasks—from routine patrols, intelligence gathering and investigations to major crime and incident responses. Their challenge is to ensure public safety despite incomplete intelligence, limited cross-jurisdictional information sharing, and tight budgets. Haystax helps law enforcement agencies prepare for and respond to any crisis with a dynamic picture of emerging threats, rapid  intelligence-collection and incident-reporting tools, and a seamlessly integrated user environment that  ensures maximum collaboration and analytically sound command decisions for rapid response.

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Haystax for Enterprise Security

Haystax has developed a suite of applications designed specifically to help corporate security decision-makers and analysts navigate this challenging environment. Haystax alerts corporate leaders to their most likely threats and natural hazards, provides critical security and operational information about each physical facility, regardless of its size or geographic location, and allows risk managers to identify and mitigate their biggest vulnerabilities. Moreover, the Haystax platform enables security teams to manage incidents and major events—from the ops center or out in the field.

Equipped with these insights, CSOs can better anticipate their risks, communicate with leadership and limit their company’s exposure to financial, legal and reputational liabilities.

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Three Weaknesses of Rules-Based Systems

September 6, 2016

Rules-based systems use ‘if-then’ rules to derive actions. For example, a fact that ‘Sally is 22 and unemployed’ is matched to a rule that ‘If a person is between 18 and 65 and is unemployed, then that person can claim unemployment,’ and concludes that therefore ‘Sally can claim unemployment.’

One advantage of these systems is that they are relatively easy to understand and can be built to represent expert judgment on simple or complicated subjects. Another is that cause-and-effect is transparent. Even though the ‘if-then’ reasoning can become complex, a domain expert can verify the rule base and make adjustments if necessary.

That said, there are three critical weaknesses to rules-based systems — and these overwhelm the advantages. First, the rules engines do not scale. They must logically become nearly as complicated as the problem the system is trying to solve. Rules must be added; they are not learned (as they are in machine learning). In practice, a ‘rules explosion’ occurs where a series of seemingly simple rules becomes a complex net of conflicting rules, overlapping rules, etc. They thus become very hard to understand in the aggregate. The more knowledge a user adds, by adding more rules, the more complex and opaque the system becomes.

Second, these systems don’t handle incomplete or incorrect information very well — data that does not have an associated rule will be ignored. This means that rules-based systems are particularly bad at detecting ‘unknown unknowns’ like new derivations of malware or new disease epidemics.

Third, rules-based systems don’t know what to do with variables that have an infinite number of possible values. There are many of these variables — for example a person’s weight, or the time it takes to complete a task, or the price of a gallon of gas. Arbitrarily making these continuous variables into discrete variables may mean missing patterns or deriving false patterns. For example, a rule flagging someone who is more than 90 days’ delinquent on debt payments may miss someone else who is chronically delinquent on debt in the last five years, but never more than 89 days late for any one account. Who is riskier?

Haystax does not use a rules-based system as the foundation of its risk analytics models. Nonetheless, we use rules in two ways:

  • First, in all models there are hard rules (e.g., ‘you must be a US citizen if you want a clearance’), which can be implemented as policy or compliance restrictions regardless of the amount of risk they may indicate.
  • Second, we use rules after the analytics have occurred to sort or highlight information. For example, we use rules to dictate what we’d like to display on our dashboards or in our reports.

In general, the Haystax approach is to use rules to reason on processed data, not as a way to process data.

Note: This is the fourth article of a five-part series. Previous articles were:

Tom Read is Director of Insider Threat Programs at Haystax Technology.

 

 

 

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