RICHLAND, WA -- A local scientist took home the highest honor for helping Homeland Security this year. Jim Thomas was selected out of 800 other nominees for the prestigious Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation 2009 Homeland Security Award for his work on Visual Analytics.

The technology is used across the world by the CIA and FBI to keep you safe from terrorists. And it was all designed right here in Richland.

"This is a technology that automatically does clustering of documents," Thomas said, pointing to the flat-screen popping with colorful graphs.

Thomas is the founding director of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Visualization and Analytics Center and a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

The software he uses is called Inspire. And it does.

"Each of these dots is a document and you can see who they all relate to each other," he explained.

In short, the technology computes thousands of documents into graphics, turning information into patterns and trends in seconds. It's called Visual Analytics. And its just that: you visualize, then analyze what you see.

"It has a real impact. It allows us to feel like we're doing what we can to protect our freedoms and that's very cool, it's very rewarding," Thomas said.

For the last several years, Jim Thomas and a team of other scientists, developed the core mathematics, statistics and style of the program at PNNL.

"This is an example of what we call LEIF. This is specifically designed for the law enforcement community," Thomas said, pointing out another version of the software.

Consider this: if a man gets into a crash, Law Enforcement Information Framework (LEIF) can tell an officer how many other crashes he's been in, where, what time, if he's a criminal. And the list goes on. It makes every police report within in the department accessible on a computer or a PDA instantly.

"They can see whether this is a good actor or bad actor and they can do this very rapidly," he said.

The same rules apply when dealing with terrorists. By uncovering hidden associations and relationships, analysts get insight and knowledge to assess terrorist threats to "detect the expected and discover the unexpected," Thomas said. And although he wouldn't go into many of those detail, Thomas swears the program is saving lives. And that was the mission.

As the technology has grown, so has its users. Everyone from banks and energy companies to health departments now use it.

And Thomas assured me, the best is yet to come.

"You're saying anyone in the future could potentially have this technology at home?" Action News asked.

"That's what we're saying. That's the dream of where we want this to go," he said.

Someday, Thomas hopes, you too will be inspired.

For more information on how Visual Analytics go to:

The Department of Homeland Security's National Visualization and Analytics Center and Regional Informational Sharing and Collaboration program, which are operated by PNNL, funded development of LEIF.

http://nvac.pnl.gov/