Marjorie Greene

It's great to come back to the best job I ever had.

Marjorie Greene, CNA’s first woman analyst, started working at CNA in September 1964 following service in Cameroon, Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Marjorie’s first assignment was the CNO Flag Plot in the Pentagon where she analyzed command and control operations during crises, beginning with message traffic related to the Gulf of Tonkin incident which had occurred a month earlier.

At that time naval message data were stored on IBM punch cards, making access to the information difficult. Marjorie developed a new analytical method of associating messages with each other through their formal references. This allowed for the creation of a unique identifying structure, formed from “reference-connected” sets, which helped identify deficiencies in the flow and use of information. She tested the system in April 1965, constructing reference-connected sets from message traffic during the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Santo Domingo.

Marjorie’s work had information-management implications far beyond the world of naval messages and, after briefing CINCLANT on her method and publishing three studies on the Dominican Republic crisis, she wrote A Reference-Connecting Technique for Automatic Information Classification and Retrieval (OEG Research Contribution 77; March 10, 1967).

Marjorie left CNA in September 1969 and over the next 40 years held positions in and outside of government. She returned in March 2010 as a research analyst and is currently with CNA Operations and Tactical Analysis where she serves as principal investigator for several projects designed to understand the linkage of process and technology to operations.

From the introduction to A Reference-Connecting Technique for Automatic Information Classification and Retrieval (OEG Research Contribution 77; March 10, 1967):

Computer technology is purported to have caused an "information explosion" which has resulted in the evolution of a new science. This new "information system science," which is a yet undefined composite of many established divisions of knowledge such as engineering, mathematics, logic, linguistics, operations research, management science, library science, etc., has as one of its subdivisions the area of "information retrieval." So while scientists in the more established disciplines continue to search for solutions to the "information retrieval problem" which will suit their own specific needs, basic research is beginning to be conducted which is not directed toward any particular user or system.

Selected Articles and Reports (most recent)

“Logistical Support for Changing Military Missions”, PHALANX

"Constructing Paths through Social Networks for Disease Surveillance", HHS Fusion Forum

“Epidemiological Monitoring for Emerging Infectious Diseases”, proceedings of the SPIE Conference on Sensors, and Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (C3I) Technologies for Homeland Security and Homeland Defense