If you happen to travel abroad for work from time to time, you may have been provided with what’s called a “threat brief” to alert you to any safety concerns at your destination. And if it was the typical threat brief, it was up to six months old and about 30 pages long, which may have left you wondering about the use of the term “brief.”

According to Mike Bishop, chief systems architect of Prescient Edge, this is what his company’s specially designed safety alert system for travelers seeks to address.

Bishop told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Walls, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016 that Prescient Traveler delivers a highly succinct, up-to-the-minute way for travelers to know whether they are in a safe area. “We have geopolitical analysts, we have threat analysts, that are looking at geopolitical instability, crime — and it’s all data driven, so we figure out where in the world there is danger down to the city level, down to the street level.”

Getting in the trenches

Bishop said that Prescient Edge has 41,000 sources of information indexed — from social media feeds to news outlets to blogs. To help make sense of the data, the company uses technology from Hortonworks, Inc. to deliver actionable intelligence to its clients.

Individual users’ profiles will also influence the alerts that they receive. “A female going some place is going to get different alerts perhaps than a male,” Bishop said.

In areas where available data is sparse, Bishop said that crowd-sourcing — simply asking people on the ground if they feel safe or not — could provide a safety rating.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE