Welcome to NU Borders' First Quarter 2022 Business Intelligence for Trade Enforcement (BITE) Newsletter!

Hello and welcome to 2022!

The Quarterly BITE Newsletter provides an overview of some of the work the BITE team has completed in the past 3 months.

BITE is an advanced analytical platform that allows trade enforcement and compliance teams to quickly ingest and analyze large amounts of trade data. The platform contains millions of trade records from across the world as well as a case management tool and the ability to identify suspicious parties within the supply chain.

What we've been up to:

1. The State Department's Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation (ISN) is using BITE on four multi-year grants! In the month of December, we provided training to a key national security group in the Ukraine as part of our support for Counter Threat Reduction efforts. In addition, our team is producing a monthly Counter Threat newsletter on behalf of the State Department to provide partner countries in the Black Sea region with the latest findings regarding sensitive technology proliferation in the region.
2. BITE continues to be used at the Department of Justice, within the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense - we truly enjoy supporting these customers and doing our part to ensure national security.
3. We have great partners! The Institute for Science and International Security, Page 4 Group, and Siracusa International Institute provide key inputs on our work with the Department of State across multiple geographical areas including South America, Baltics, Mediterranean, South East Asia and the Balkans.
4. BITE 2.0 is wrapped up and ready to go! We’ve completed code on our new Software as a Service offering that will include more tools for trade compliance and enforcement professionals - we’re focused on making the lives of import/export and support chain compliance personnel easier!

What we've learned:

1. Our Big Data ingest pipeline has grown to be more robust and accurate - we’ve significantly reduced the time it takes to get very large static datasets into the platform, with all necessary cleansing and enrichments. We need to document all the add-ons to the ELT process and ensure all engineers are aware of any changes made to the code in Dev.
2. Data enrichments are our strong point - all our data is overlaid with multiple international screening and watchlists so that analysts can easily pinpoint transactions and entities of interest within the supply chain.
3. Our production definition needs work - there is a lot going on with BITE and we need to make sure our customers understand the full power of the platform.

What we're doing next:

1. Building on our work within the International Wildlife Trafficking (IWT) domain, we will plan to hold a webinar at the end of February in support of IWT, with our partners at ZCA, PDC and FCS. Our team will demo BITE use cases specific to IWT and identify how data analytics can support this important mission space. We’ll hear from our partners about the critical initiatives they are undertaking.
2. We’re going to start blogging soon! We’re finding a lot of interesting things in our trade data across multiple domains that we’d like to share with you - look out for the blog coming soon to our website.
3. BITE 2.0 will officially launch this quarter - we’re rigorously testing and preparing our DevOps pipeline to support the new product. We’re planning to pilot BITE 2.0 with seasoned compliance specialists and look forward to helping create efficiencies in the day-to-day workflow.