Sparklight Analytics' founding principals are to provide our customers with the best options and solutions to achieve success.

Sparklight Analytics — Company Overview Sparklight Analytics was founded on the principle of providing clients with the highest-quality options, strategies, and solutions needed to achieve mission success. Our work is grounded in deep technical expertise, decades of operational experience, and a proven track record supporting government, academic, and private-sector organizations.

Extensive Government & Enterprise Systems Experience

Before the establishment of Sparklight Analytics, our leadership team built an extensive portfolio of consulting and systems-engineering experience across numerous U.S. government agencies and major institutions. Collectively, the team brings more than 25 years of experience in software engineering, operations research, database management, systems architecture, and full-lifecycle development of large-scale information systems. Our technical background includes substantial contributions to mission-critical programs for organizations such as the University of Maryland, the State of Maryland, Fannie Mae, the Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Across these engagements, we have designed, analyzed, developed, and maintained complex enterprise platforms; implemented high-performance transactional and analytical interfaces; and engineered advanced rules engines that directly support operational decision-making. For more than 27 years, our leadership has also specialized in the tactical use of information to support national-security missions—including the identification and disruption of terrorists, transnational criminal networks, money-laundering operations, and contraband smuggling. This subject-matter expertise continues to inform Sparklight Analytics’ approach to data modeling, anomaly detection, and intelligence-driven analytics.

Recognition & Awards

The work now embedded in Sparklight Analytics’ corporate capability has been recognized through multiple government awards and commendations, including CBP’s prestigious Blue Eagle Award.

Key Areas of Corporate Capability

Enterprise Architecture & High-Scale Analytics

At the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Sparklight Analytics’ leadership architected and deployed the Enterprise Rules Engine (ERE)—one of the agency’s most significant analytical modernization initiatives. Supported by FinCEN’s Director, CTO, and CIO, this effort delivered advanced event-surfacing capabilities by integrating Oracle and SAS to produce high-performance analytical outcomes that aid in combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and transnational organized crime. The company also designed FinCEN’s enterprise entity-resolution platform, a multi-tiered system used across the U.S. government to identify individuals and organizations engaged in illicit activities. Our technical contributions include work across Hadoop, Elasticsearch, Neo4j, PostgreSQL, Solr, and other modern data ecosystems.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Sparklight Analytics has initiated and guided multiple artificial intelligence and machine-learning programs within FinCEN and partner agencies. These efforts leverage deep learning, Spark, Scala, Python, and advanced graph, text, and relational-analysis methods to detect health-care fraud, money laundering patterns, compromised financial institutions, weapons-proliferation networks, and emerging threats. Our methodologies include anomaly detection, topic modeling, pattern mining, and multi-modal data fusion across document stores, graphs, and relational systems. We also co-developed a government-wide assessment framework for evaluating national-security threats using a systematic approach centered on threat, vulnerability, consequence, and mitigation analysis.

Border Security, Targeting Systems & National-Security Support

Sparklight Analytics’ foundational expertise also includes nearly two decades of direct contribution to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Automated Targeting System (ATS)—the government’s primary platform for assessing risk across international passengers, cargo, conveyances, and related entities. Our engineering work on ATS encompassed the design and development of:

• AI-driven expert systems for risk evaluation
• Automated data-standardization and parsing pipelines
• Rule-based analytic engines for detecting fraud, terrorism risks, and contraband activity
• Custom data-retrieval systems for airline reservation data
• Cross-agency communications mechanisms supporting CBP, the Department of State, TSA, Border Patrol, and other partners

Our previous operational support has contributed to real-time targeting of terrorists, narcotics traffickers, currency smugglers, and other high-risk actors. The company’s experience also includes participation in advanced training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center and providing instruction to operational personnel on the effective use of ATS and related analytical tools.