Meet Giavid Valiyev, data scientist at the NCI Agency

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MEET GIAVID VALIYEV

Data Scientist at the NCI Agency

Giavid Valiyev received the Young Scientist of the Year award from the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO)’s Information Systems Technology Panel for his ‘’valuable contribution to NATO’s digital endeavour’’

Valiyev is from Italy. He earned a degree in data science from Milan-Bicocca University, and joined the university’s research centre after graduation. He first joined the NCI Agency Data Science team in 2017 as an intern. He is now a full-time staff member and lives in The Hague, Netherlands.

Q

What do you do for the Agency?

A I analyse data to highlight patterns and insights for decision-makers. My objective is to help them make better, faster data-driven decisions. The Data Science team receives a huge quantity of data, generated by NATO, and it’s our job to analyse relevant data from different military domains, such as space, defence, cyber and more. We apply algorithms and models to this data to identify patterns/trends and create solutions for the specific problems that our stakeholders are working on. We do this on a daily basis for a number of teams – Allied Command Transformation (ACT), Allied Command Operations (ACO), NATO Headquarters – to name only a few.

The data we analyse comes in two forms: structured and unstructured. Structured data could be numerical tables and spreadsheets, whereas unstructured data is more text-based or images and data gathered from sensors, such as drone sensors for example. The data that we use to analyse and problem-solve come from many sources across NATO – military exercises, operations and documents.

I began my journey at the NCI Agency as an intern four years ago, in 2017, when the Data Science team was just forming. I was lucky enough to be part of the development of the team and see it grow. After 2017, I worked as a contractor in the Data Science team for a few years. In March 2020, I became a NATO international civilian.

The Young Scientist Award that I am receiving is in recognition of the work I have done and been a part of over the past three years in the Data Science team.

Q

Why is your work important for NATO?

A NATO benefits from our work because we help guide and inform the strategic direction of the Alliance. We exploit and analyse data for strategic purposes and military benefit, to help decision-makers make better choices that are backed up by data. Data science in general can help NATO learn an awful lot.

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104 The area of artificial intelligence (AI) is the future, for society and businesses in general, but also within a military environment. The Data Science team and NATO know that they must stay relevant and be aware of any emerging AI technology. It is key that NATO has a Data Science team and is aware of all the solutions we can provide, with AI being a major tool in our problem-solving kit.

Q What projects have you been working on recently that contributed to you winning this award?

A We recently worked on a project for NATO’s Command, Control, Communications (C3) Board to analyse their strategy and policy documents. Our analysis aimed to help the policymakers develop future policies by identifying duplications and areas of inconsistencies across current documents.

We also supported the NATO Joint Analysis and Lessons Learned Centre (JALLC) by analysing data from the military exercise Trident Juncture 2018. This was NATO’s largest exercise for over a decade and it generated a huge quantity of data. We analysed unstructured data coming in from Trident Juncture 2018 to give the JALLC better insight into the successes and failures that occurred during the exercise. We were able to analyse emails, chat messages and documents to identify trends that could improve results for the next time.

Hackathons are a popular approach to problem-solving using new technologies, so in 2020 I was a mentor for one of the challenges at the TIDE hackathon, organized by ACT, and the year before I also supported the Ukrainian Defence Hackathon together with my colleagues from the NCI Agency.

Q

Can you let us know about your recent achievements?

A Currently, our team is looking at how to better understand natural ‘conversational’ language used at NATO and apply that to our digital world. Google created an algorithm called ‘BERT’, which we have retrained in order to improve the understanding of NATO conversational language across all our digital platforms. Why are we doing this? Well, after a few years of experimenting, we realized that models such as BERT, trained on publicly available data such as Wikipedia, do not perform well on NATO platforms as they do not

Some of the data science team analysing data to provide patterns and insights (PHOTO: NCI AGENCY)

“The achievements that led to the IST Young Scientist Award are very much team achievements”

understand our natural language, nor our acronyms and jargon. Natural Language Processing (NLP) will sit behind certain programmes at NATO and also be applied directly to our projects. It will be rolled out to different areas across NATO in the future.

Together with ACT, we have also been looking at open-source Big Data (data available for free on the internet) to give NATO officers insight into the resilience of different geographical areas – resilience from different perspectives, such as energy, communications and transport. In case something occurs, a crisis for example, our aim is to understand how this could impact NATO operations and exercises.

The achievements that led to the IST Young Scientist Award are very much team achievements. We are a small and newly formed team, but we are making a huge impact across NATO through great teamwork. The Data Science team is quite diverse. It comprises 40% women, and our members come from across the Alliance – Albania, Croatia, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, among others. Having diversity in the team creates better results, because it brings diverse thinking and problem-solving.