InterLink Corp. tapped to improve search functionality of cyber-risk research portal

InferLink Corp. will develop advanced search functionality for a cybersecurity research portal known as the Information Marketplace for Policy and Analysis of Cyber-risk and Trust (IMPACT) under a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) contract awarded on Tuesday.

The $750,000 contract will be administered under the DHS Small Business Innovation Research Other Agencies Technology Solutions program. IMPACT reduces cyber security research and development costs for academic, industry and government cybersecurity researchers through the sharing of data, tools, models, and methodologies.

“Ensuring researchers have the most relevant information and data will greatly strengthen their ability to pinpoint emerging cybersecurity issues and speed development of new solutions,” DHS Science and Technology Directorate Director Douglas Maughan said. “With an enhanced search function, IMPACT will deliver to these researchers more relevant data and timely informational resources they can use to make key decisions in all phases of their research.”

Under the contract, InterLink will work to build on ActiveSearch technology, a framework that supports intuitive user searches of datasets, software, and analytics on the IMPACT portal.

“Enhancing the ‘findability’ of technical data for R&D is one of the most impactful ways to advance development of new, cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions,” IMPACT Program Manager Erin Kenneally said. “The growing number of informational resources of varying quality poses a challenge to efficiently and effectively connecting this cybersecurity supply and demand with researchers. InferLink will leverage its novel semantic search framework to support enhancement of both targeted and organic search results that will support R&D in a wide-range of cybersecurity problem areas.”

Specifically, InterLink will be tasked with enhancing semantic search functionality, finding new ways for users to discover relevant resources and ensuring sub-second response time for the search system.