A-Space Past and Future

This week marks the second anniversary of the first live internal demo of the intelligence community’s A-Space project, groundbreaking for the IC in its goal of collaborative use of social media across agency lines. Somewhere in Maryland, a remarkable government employee and friend named Mike Wertheimer should pause and quietly celebrate the fruition of his early evangelism for it.

I was still a government employee then, but wrote about the effort at the time here on Shepherd’s Pi (“A-Space: Top-secret social networking“). It makes me chuckle to remember back to those days when it was still mostly unheard-of for IC employees to blog openly on the public web about current technology projects. Now you can’t shut ‘em up!

It made sense, I thought, to set down a few notes at the time for several reasons:

1. A-Space was intended by Mike’s Analytic Transformation team of the Office of the DIrector of National Intelligence (ODNI) to take advantage of social-media advances then occuring rapidly on the internet, more rapidly than behind our firewalls. I had joined Twitter for example in March 2007, but few of my IC colleagues had Twitter accounts or access from work machines. Same for Facebook and LinkedIn. I blogged about A-Space because I felt we needed to socialize externally the path we were following internally, in order to attract good ideas and assistance from Silicon Valley and technologists who had little knowledge of intelligence work.
2. The time would come when A-Space would be all grown up and accepted as a success, I hoped – and at that point “paternity” could become an issue. We had seen the same thing happen with Intellipedia, which has had several bouts of being claimed as a CIA creation rather than its more community-minded actual roots – and I thought it might be best to set the record straight early on. As Winston Churchill said about World War II, he intended history to treat him fairly “because I intend to write it.”
3. I had announced my “retirement” from government service and was ready to go back to the private sector, and was frankly intent on setting a mark with A-Space so that later leadership might be less inclined to reverse course, against the use of social and collaborative tools.

So here we are, two years on.  I am relieved that A-Space lives! At this point in their lives Twitter and Facebook were themselves  not quite into their hockey-stick growth cycle as social-media phenomena. Think back to Facebook of early 2006 (it was launched in February 2004), or Twitter of March 2008 (it launched in its first alpha baby SMS steps in March 2007.  If you’re interested, Flickr holds some interesting screenshots of the very early Twitter beta screens by their designer).

This week Joab Jackson, senior technology editor at Government Computer News has an update titled “A-Space Melds Social Media and Intelligence Gathering,” quoting Ahmad Ishaq, who manages the project at DIA for the ODNI. I like giving him praise – not just because I hired him, but because he is doing  a bang-up job in difficult circumstances. Let’s just say that he and his team have been dealing with my third bullet point above during the last couple of years.

One of Ahmad’s smart tactics has been to enlist supportive users from multiple agencies as vocal advocates. The GCN article provides an example illustrating the cross-agency collaboration that was mandated by the 9/11 Commission and WMD Commission reports, and which A-Space and its sister tools are helping to realize:

A Homeland Security Department analyst needed to identify a person whose face was found posted on several street and stop signs in a region of the United States. So he posted a scan of the poster on A-Space and received information and photos from seven other agencies. With that information, he could run an image search of the face, which ultimately provided identification.” -Government Computer News

There’s been a lot of change in A-Space since I left – in the requirements, in the emerging business practices, in the software baseline used, and – perhaps explaining some of that – in the contractor team used. That’s all fodder for another article, perhaps.

Whither Analytic Collaboration?

What I prefer to focus on is the future potential of this tool and others in enabling progress for intelligence analysis and collaboration. Ahmad gives one window in the GCN article, and it’s a topic he and I have talked about recently:

[A]llowing analysts to share all this information is only the first step of A-Space. Ishaq and his team are exploring ways of making all the information that is being generated machine-readable. Ishaq would like to incorporate elements of the Semantic Web tools, which would allow them to draw inferences from existing material.

“Right now, the communication is between person and machine,” he said. “We’re trying to take it a step further, to machine-to-machine. So the end-user logs in to the computer, and everything he could possibly want would be there, without doing searches or clicking around.” -Government Computer News

But I’m sure that Ahmad would be among the first to agree that technology is perhaps among the lesser factors which will contribute to the success or failure of analytic collaboration (and “transformation” – an overused term but a worthy goal). Much more important are the social and cultural aspects of the workforce, the workplace, and the changing nature of intelligence work itself  – in response to and support of a dramatically changing foreign policy approach, driven as much by political transition as by societal shifts.

For the moment, let’s keep the focus on the tools though. As A-Space continues taking its own baby steps, it is worthwhile to consider the experience of its older sister Intellipedia – and that sytem’s progenitor Wikipedia. 

Early this year, GCN carried another Joab Jackson article claiming: “Intellipedia Suffers Midlife Crisis.” Much chatter ensued. Some of the challenges dealt with in the article are being addressed internally by the likes of the IC’s Chris Rasmussen, with new and complementary efforts such as Intellipublia (see Federal Computer Week, “Intelligence community wrestles with Web 2.0 tools for information sharing“).

The looming question rises about the overall significance of Web 2.0 style tools.  Dr. Mark Drapeau argued early this year in a widely read piece that “Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crsis.”  Now, more concrete and noteworthy stats are emerging about the hallmark Web 2.0 tools which inspired many of the IC’s efforts.

Could Crowd-Sourcing Max Out?

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported on new research  (“Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages“) showing that “unprecedented numbers of the millions of online volunteers who write, edit and police it are quitting.” They’re leaving Wikipedia and not being replaced by as many new volunteers, undercutting the “many-eyes” approach that crowd-sourcing relies upon. The numbers are striking: “In the first three months of 2009, Wikipedia lost more than 49,000 editors, compared to 4,900 a year earlier,” reports ZDNet based on the new research (more details here: “Is Wikipedia Maxed Out?”). An influential Econsultancy.com blog now asks in response: “Is free user-generated content dying?”

It is worth keeping an eye on the pulse of Intellipedia and A-Space, as their activity levels wax or wane. Unlike Wikipedia, they are work systems, not free web tools. So the issues there are the differential adoption and longevity of enterprise tools, as explored in Andrew McAfee’s excellent new book Enterprise 2.0.  

For the new intelligence tools, much will depend on their inclusion within agency official processes and analytic-tradecraft training programs. As Chris Rasmussen has pointed out about A-Space, it may still be true that “not a single agency recognizes A-Space content as official.” But social collaboration is more and more an accepted and critical requirement of all information technologies – we’re certainly reflecting that at Microsoft, and have been busy building such capabilities into the new Office 2010 suite (info and free beta sign-up here).

The wave is not going away (well, Google Wave might go away… see here and here and here and oh never mind…)

Who best reflects the pulse of A-Space and Intellipedia? There are many intel-watchers in my blogroll over on the margin, who chart the progress of the IC’s collaborative ways. I can also recommend Chris Dorobek’s reporting on the topic for FedNewsRadio; see his piece from July 2009 ”Intel on the government 2.0 front lines – and a new report assessing A-Space” and more recently his article “November’s Signal column: The Intelligence Community Writes the Book on Collaboration” – both have insight and supportive links as well.

There will be other ODNI and constituent agency efforts to provide cutting-edge collaborative and analytic software and techniques. A-Space will be improved upon, no doubt.

The real test of A-Space – while we have it – and its intelligence utility will come in secret moments of crisis, but also in less-flashy use of consistent collaborative processes which over time contribute to the uncovering of truth for our decision-makers and national leaders. Of necessity, most successes will be unseen by the outside world… and likely, most failures as well.  For now, a happy beta anniversary to the A-Space team and its users.

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Data in the Cloud from Dallas to Mars

There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC 09); it’s a traditional launchpad for cool new stuff. I thought I’d point out several of the government-relevant announcements and technology roll-outs.

I specifically want to spotlight something called Codename Dallas, and how NASA and others have begun using it. In the keynote this morning Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie told PDC attendees (and his streaming-video audience) that a landslide of new sensors and observational systems are changing the world by recording “unimaginable volumes of data… But this data does no good unless we turn the potential into the kenetic, unless we unlock it and innovate in the realm of applications and solutions that’s wrapped around that data.”

Here’s how we’re addressing that, with a bit of step-by-step context on the overall cloud-computing platform enabling it.  The steps are: 1. Azure, 2. Pinpoint, and 3. Dallas.

Today is the big public roll-out of the Windows Azure Platform for cloud computing and a full complement of new services for it,  including a Java SDK, REST and open source support and interoperability with MySQL, Tomcat, memcached, and even PHP development with Eclipse. The Windows Azure site is here, or just check out a brief summary of today’s Azure announcement and its array of cloud services. 

As part of the Windows Azure rollout, we’re announcing the new Pinpoint, an online marketplace for Microsoft partners to market and sell their applications.  It includes an “app store,” as well as store-like shopping for experts and professional IT services. Pinpoint is open to everyone, and free to join, and is already at launch the largest directory of qualified IT providers and their software built on Microsoft technologies. The app store alone is cool, as you can try, buy, and download software through direct links to software purchase pages, demos, and trial downloads.

One of the featured sets of services available through Pinpoint is our Codename “Dallas” service, Microsoft’s Information Services business, which developers and information workers can use to find and manage Web services and datasets  – free or paid – to power their apps, on any platform. Dallas is built completely on the Windows Azure cloud platform, which includes a SQL Azure cloud database, so you get the ability to store structured and unstructured data whether from Dallas’s “data-as-a-service” or your own collections, to invoke and examine the data without having to parse it, to use REST services to manipulate and move the data, and to analyze the data using the new PowerPivot high-end analytics for Excel 2010 spreadsheets, for example.

Large-scale datasets already available through Dallas include government, financial, weather, news, corporate, international and reference sets including those from the Associated Press, Citysearch, Data.gov, ESRI, First American Corp., infoUSA.com Inc., NASA, National Geographic TOPO!, NAVTEQ, RiskMetrics Group, the United Nations, WaveMarket Inc. and Weather Central Inc. Starting today, “Dallas” is available as a limited community technology preview (CTP). 

Tech news sites are already reporting the “competitive drive” propelling Dallas, for example The Register puts it this way: 

Microsoft Dallas Muscles Google Data Crusade: Microsoft is hoping to out-Google Google by unlocking the world’s information and slapping a GUI on the front end. Today, the company unveiled Dallas, which chief software architect Ray Ozzie said would deliver “data as a service.” He described it as a “game changing” subsystem of Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing and storage service.

There’s a lot you  can do with a data platform like that. The federal government’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra moments ago addressed PDC 09 live via remote video and announced that the U.S. government has been busy building new capabilities using Dallas and the Azure cloud, and he showed a very neat example: the NASA “Be a Martian” site. From the detailed press release:

Now anyone with a Web browser can become a Martian explorer. That’s because NASA is launching a new citizen-science Web site, called “Be a Martian,” that gives people a chance to view hundreds of thousands of images gathered over decades of exploration on the Red Planet.

The site is also designed as a game with a twofold purpose: NASA and Microsoft hope it will spur interest in science and technology among students in the U.S. and around the world. It also is a “crowdsourcing” tool designed to tap visitors’ brains and help the space agency process volumes of Mars images.

“We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for NASA. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important.” [emphasis added]

So NASA and Microsoft are combining crowd-sourcing, cloud-computing, and citizen-science, all toward aligning with a web philosophy that Tim O’Reilly calls “small pieces loosely joined.”

There’s more coming this week that I believe government folks will like, including one of my favorite projects: Thursday’s unveiling of the Microsoft Semantic Engine.  My team back at my old government hangout did a lot of pathbreaking semantic-analysis research and development, and I hope that they will find this very cool stuff indeed. Not allowed to say more yet -  though I see that others in semantic-web circles are eager to hear more. Stay tuned!

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Para Bellum Web

Tim O'Reilly, Ray Ozzie

Tim O’Reilly created a bit of a stir last night in the tech world by writing a thoughtful essay entitled “The War for the Web.” He’ll be expanding on his thoughts in his keynote address today at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. From the essay, here’s the core argument:

“[W]e’ve grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we’ve been readying ourselves for one dominant social network. But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I’ve been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. [emphasis added] Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

… P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

The coda there, with the Microsoft prediction, is what fascinated me – so much so that I mentioned it on Twitter. Tim immmediately responded, “Thanks. I should write a followup explaining the logic that got me to the PS.”  While we wait for that, though, here’s my prediction – with a bit of inside knowledge – today Microsoft begins to live up to Tim’s expectations with several announcements at our Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2009 in Los Angeles.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, and the future of the web and computing as we see it, watch live as Ray Ozzie lays it out in his keynote address, streamed live today at 11:30 eastern time, 8:30 am Pacific, over at http://microsoftpdc.com/.

Oh – and if your Latin is rusty, my title above comes from the phrase ”Si vis pacem, para bellum” – the classic doctrine of maintaining peace & deterring war by being better armed and prepared. It is generally attributed to Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, a fourth-century AD Roman military scholar whom I consider the Sun Tzu of the West. I’ve known many fans of his philosophy in the Pentagon.

Now it may turn out that, whether they know it or not, Microsoft techies are building new ways to avoid a war on the open web. As Sun Tzu wrote,  ”To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue an enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” Watch our PDC this week to see examples of what I consider the modern technological acme of skill.

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Cyber Deterrence Symposium webcast

As I type this, I’m sitting in a seventh-floor conference area at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, listening to the keynote speaker for the second of five panels today in the “Cyber Deterrence Symposium,” a joint production of INSA (the Intelligence and National Security Alliance), and the Homeland Security Policy Institute.

If you’re reading this on the day of the symposium (Monday November 2, 2009), you can tune in to the live webcast of the speakers and panels. It is a stellar line-up, see the roster below.

There’s a follow-on conference tomorrow at which I’ll be participating in a panel; however Day 2 is a series of classified sessions at another facility, and won’t be available as a webcast…  If you’re a really talented hacker and you’re able to watch tomorrow’s sessions over the web, drop me a line and let me know how :)

Sessions at today’s Cyber Deterrence Symposium:

8:00‐8:10 AM Welcome

Frank Cilluffo, Director, HSPI and Ellen McCarthy, President, INSA

 

8:10‐8:30 AM Opening Remarks

The Honorable Charles Allen

HSPI Steering Committee and INSA Senior Intelligence Advisor

 

8:30‐9:10 AM Keynote Address

The Honorable Jaak Aaviksoo

Minister of Defence, Republic of Estonia

 

9:20‐10:20 AM Session One—The Cyber Threat

Keynote Jim Lewis, Director and Senior Fellow, Technology and Public Policy Program, Center for Strategic and International Studies

Panelists Roger Cressey, President, Good Harbor

Mike Delaney, Majority Staff Director, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. House of Representatives

Sam Visner, Vice President, Strategy and Business Development for Enforcement, Security, and Intelligence Division, CSC - 2 -

 

10:30‐11:30 PM Session Two—Deterrent Capability

Keynote The Honorable Michael Nacht, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs, Department of Defense

Panelists Martin Libicki, Senior Policy Analyst, RAND Corporation

Richard O’Neill, President, The Highlands Forum

Terry Pudas, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Technology and National Security Policy

Lee Zeichner, President, Zeichner Risk Analytics

 

11:45‐12:45 PM Lunch & Keynote Address

The Honorable Susan M. Collins, Ranking Member, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, U.S. Senate

 

1:00‐2:00 PM Session Three—Solutions

Keynote Richard Barrett, Coordinator, Al‐Qaeda Taliban Monitoring Team, United Nations

Panelists David Grannis, Majority Staff Director, Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Senate

Dan Hall, Vice President, Cyber Security/CNCI Coordinator, ManTech International Corporation

Neill Sciarrone, Former Special Assistant to the President for Homeland Security; Director, Cyber Security and Information Sharing, BAE Systems

Amit Yoran, Former Director, National Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security

 

2:10‐3:10 PM Session Four—Implementation

Keynote The Honorable Philip Reitinger, Deputy Undersecretary for the National Protection and Programs Directorate, Department of Homeland Security

Panelists Steve Chabinsky, Deputy Assistant Director, FBI Cyber Division

Jeff Cooper, Vice President for Technology, SAIC

Thom Shanker, Correspondent, The New York Times

Suzanne Spaulding, Principal, Bingham Consulting Group - 3 -

 

3:20‐4:20 PM Presentation of INSA Cyber Task Force Paper: “Public Private Partnership for Cyber Incidence Response”

Panelists Lou Von Thaer, Steve Cambone, Barbara Fast, Charlie Allen, Bob Gourley, Bob Farrell, and Mike Karpovich

 

4:30 PM Closing Keynote

Chris Painter

Acting Senior Director of Cybersecurity, National Security Council

 

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Stop by Tuesday for dinner or a drink with a great guy (and me)

I’m taking up my duties as a public-spirited citizen next week on Tuesday evening, by hosting a fun little fundraiser for my local Congressman – and if you’re going to be in Washington DC the evening of 10/27 I hope you’ll join me (click here for the invitation and details). It’ll be a fun evening; we’ll be at the ultra-cool Johnny’s Half-Shell on Capitol Hill after all.

I’m looking forward to introducing friends to someone who I think stands head and shoulders above the current claptrap-echo-chamber that passes for informed political discourse in Our Nation’s Capital   I could put on the hard-sell for my friends in DoD or the national security community, since this fellow is increasingly influential on the Armed Services Committee, but that’s not why I’m supporting him.

My congressional district is Virginia’s historic First District, which is pretty darn big and important for the nation – it stretches all the way from DC’s Northern Virginia suburbs down along the Chesapeake Bay to the shipyards at Hampton Roads.  I love it because of the natural protected beauty and because of the history; it’s home to Jamestown and the birthplace of George Washington, and really has been the cradle of American democracy.

People here still take popular representation seriously – and we’ve got a new young member of Congress, my onetime-neighbor from Montross, Rob Wittman. He was the mayor of Montross (pop. 315) for a while, and is exactly the kind of elected official I’ve always liked: he avoids rhetoric or labels, focusing instead on good solid public policy. As his Wikipedia entry points out, Rob “worked for 20 years with the Virginia Department of Health,” and quoting from his bio:

Rob worked for many years as an environmental health specialist for local health departments in Virginia’s Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula regions. He holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from Virginia Commonwealth University, a Master of Public Health degree in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology from Virginia Tech.

Rob’s service in Congress is important, I think, so I’ve decided to help him win re-election. In Congress, he serves on the House Armed Services Committee, already as ranking member on the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee – he’s a tough Pentagon watchdog but a strong supporter of a robust Navy fleet. He also sits on the House Committee on Natural Resources, where he is a champion of the Chesapeake Bay for its environmental and economic attributes, using his professional expertise in water quality and fisheries for the environmental clean-up of the Bay. That’s what he ran on, that’s what he’s doing already in his first full term.

I also like that he’s tech-savvy and a Gov 2.0 kind of guy (check him out on Twitter and Facebook).

If you like the sound of that and would like to support Rob, click here to send an email RSVP’ing for the reception/dinner, or even if you live elsewhere or can’t make it in person I would appreciate your donation. I vouch for this guy.

Does it matter where you place yourself on the political spectrum? There is no single slot that would hold me – or many of my friends, frankly, who range from fuzzy centrists to Maoists to Goldwater Girls (remember them?). My political leanings have always puzzled folks; I’ve worked for Democratic elected officials in the nation’s most liberal city, San Francisco (like my friend Mayor Frank Jordan), and yet I’m also supporting Wittman, who’s a moderate Republican. I tend to vote for someone I believe is the best possible choice.

Some people (and news channels) like to portray the nation as bifurcated along a politico-philosophical axis of Left and Right – as in this new visually creative effort from the great “Information is Beautiful” site to capture the spectrum in a single info-graphic (click the thumbnail on the left to see it in full detail).

 

But I’ve been politically aware – and active – since I was a kid. I told the story once (in an online interview about my “path to Gov 2.0″) of how I got started:

As a kid in the ‘60s I was a political junkie, and I made candy money at the age of 6 by swarming parking lots for my local congressman in North Carolina and putting his bumperstickers on cars. A nickel a car for me, and no permission sought; people would at some point discover they had been driving around advertising their Member of Congress. Imagine if politicians today were remotely adding a banner ad to constituents’ personal websites and blogs!”

Things are different now; I’m actually asking people upfront to support the candidate I like   If you can make it Tuesday night, let me know ($100 gets you in the door!). Even if you can’t make it but you like the idea of having a sane, responsible person like Rob Wittman among the lunatics in Congress, you can still contribute and I’ll thank you profusely!

By the way, I like the fact that the First District produced three of the first five presidents (Washington, Monroe, Madison). Just my little thought, but maybe we’re overdue….

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DCGS Worldwide Conference 2009 is next week

US Joint Forces Command is sponsoring next week’s third annual DCGS Worldwide Conference in Virginia Beach, and I’m looking forward to participating on a great panel. If you don’t know much about the world of the ”Distributed Common Ground/Surface System,” you can find some slightly dated background information at http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/systems/dcgs.htm. DCGS is in many ways all about ISR, or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance – as well as their integration throughout the defense intelligence enterprise through the network of JIOCs (Joint Intelligence Operations Centers) and elsewhere.

 

There aren’t a lot of unclassified guides to the DCGS and ISR world for me to point to out on the web as background, although an anti-war group has posted a draft version of Army Intelligence Field Manual  (FM) 2-01, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, which you can read in html format here.

 

For up-to-date information, why not register at the conference website and attend?

 

The conference’s overall goal is ”bringing together program offices, developers, and users to focus on establishing a fully integrated and seamless Enterprise in support of the warfighter.” Quoting more specifically from the conference material, “The conference objectives are to:

• Improve knowledge of DCGS and JIOC capabilities for security, engagement and relief and reconstruction activities
• Increase the utility and value DCGS provides to Irregular Warfare and General Purpose Forces operating independently, and through increasingly lower echelons
• Markedly improve the ability to integrate with U.S. agencies, coalition forces, and other partners across the ISR enterprise
• Inspire new thinking in areas of acquisition of ISR services, DCGS capability metrics, and the rapid delivery of intelligence solutions to the warfighter.”

 

The panel I’m participating on is titled ”Amplifying ISR: Bringing Proven Advanced Video Processing Technologies to the Warfighter Now,” led by my good friend John Marshall. Below is the line up of the panel, which will focus primarily on the key topic of how to exploit and manage the waves of information coming off the profusion of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) around the world.

Moderator: Mr. John A. Marshall
Chief Technology Officer

Joint Transformation Command – Intelligence

United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM)

 

Panel Members:

Ms. Michelle Munson
President and Co-Founder, Aspera, Inc.

Mr. Lewis Shepherd
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Institute 

Panel Members:

Mr. Robert Gourley
CTO, Crucial Point

Mr. Rudi Ernst
CEO/CTO, Pixia Corporation


Ms. Casey Henson
DIA/DS-CTO

Dr. Kari Kelton, Ph.D.
Chief System Sciences Officer, NSI, Inc.

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The scientist who gave DARPA ChemBot a holographic Twitter

If that title seems a bit LSD-fueled, the subject matter warrants it. Here comes some Chemistry gone wild!

First, have a look at this bizarre video. It stars a soft robot, or chemical robot – “ChemBot.” Even the experienced geeks at IEEE Spectrum are calling it “by far one of the coolest and weirdest robot prototypes we have ever seen.”

This particular prototype by iRobot and University of Chicago researchers was just unveiled, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems this past week. (More on the conference here.) It was built in response to DARPA’s interest in chemical robots, a program run by Dr. Mitchell Zakin.

The DARPA “ChemBots” page describes the program as creating “a convergence between materials chemistry and robotics through the application of any one of a number of approaches, including gel-solid phase transitions, electro- and magneto-rheological materials, geometric transitions, and reversible chemical and/or particle association and dissociation.”

What’s the anticipated DoD mission use? In DARPA’s words, “With ChemBots, our warfighters can gain access to denied spaces and perform tasks safely, covertly, and efficiently.”  Or, as CNet’s “Crave” gadget blog puts it, “the weird little blob inflates and deflates parts of its body, changing size and shape–and scaring the living daylights out of us. We don’t know exactly when ChemBot will join the Armed Forces, but we can only beg: please, oh please, keep it away from us.”

 Does Mitch Zakin Dream of Electric Sheep?

With that kind of geeky appeal, this video has been gathering some Internet buzz over the weekend, appearing on several tech blogs. But the better story is the scientist behind the science. Several of us have been following Mitch Zakin’s work for a while, primarily because he is also the PM for the Programmable Matter Program — the “novel physics” of “a new functional form of matter, based on mesoscale particles, which can reversibly assemble into complex 3D objects upon external command.”

There is revolutionary promise for such composability in multiple fields, not just defense. Zakin described it several years ago in a speech as “a concept so simple, yet so revolutionary that it pushes even the DARPA envelope. A vision that has profound implications for how we think about chemistry and materials. A vision that could provide our warfighters with meaningful technological surprise.”

Zakin is a demonstrably brilliant scientist, of the sort you expect to find at DARPA. Indeed, in that same speech (“The Next Revolution in Materials“) which he gave at DARPA’s 25th Systems and Technology Symposium a couple of years ago, Dr. Zakin said: “I joined DARPA because it is unfettered by conventional wisdom.” 

One area where he has been exploring beyond traditional boundaries is in developing “the infochemistry project,” which combines the powers of chemistry and information technology. In an exotic illustration, Dr. Zakin is directing a research program on “Chemical Communications,” which I’m not sure I fully understand but which sounds like some sort of holographic persistent Twitter:

The Chemical Communications Program is exploring innovative methods to develop self-powered chemical systems that can encode an input string of alphanumeric characters (i.e., a message), convert the message to a modulated optical signal, and transmit it repetitively to a receiver. 

The ultimate goal of this program is to develop a small replicator device, with the form factor of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or cell phone that―

• Permits the user to input an arbitrary 60-character alphanumeric message.
• Translates the message into an appropriate set of modulated chemistries.
• Embeds these chemistries into a disposable substrate (the transmitter).
• Ejects the substrate for deployment.

The replicator device will enable warfighters to generate disposable optical transmitters in real time, each with a user-specified message.  It will be compact, lightweight, and powered by batteries or solar cells.                        – DARPA website, Chemical Communications Program

With projects like these under his belt, Zakin is credited with reviving the chemistry discipline at DARPA, which had fallen away over the years. But now he’s scheduled to leave the agency in 2010. He is uncertain where he’s heading, but perhaps he can be persuaded to spend some time with like-minded souls in Microsoft Research; I suspect many there would find his infochemistry approach very appealing.  

An interesting profile of Dr. Zakin in the journal Analytical Chemistry notes that “Academia is one option. Venture capitalism is another. Zakin has launched so many basic science research projects that have the potential of becoming commercial products that he says, ‘it’s almost a sin not to look at all that from the other side.’ ”

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Departure of the Pentagon CISO

I’ve had the good fortune to work with talented folks in my (short) time in Washington, since moving back East in 2002, particularly in the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense.  And one such fellow at DoD has been Bob Lentz, the outgoing deputy assistant secretary of Defense for information and identity assurance – the Chief Information Assurance Officer and equivalent to a private-sector CISO.

I gave an interview this afternoon to Federal News Radio (AM 1500 in the DC area, worldwide at www.FederalNewsRadio.com), on Bob’s tenure, and what will come next for DoD in the wake of his departure. You can read the news story about the interview here, or listen to the entire 15-minute interview as an mp3:

Shepherd interview on Federal News Radio, 10/13/2009

Once you get past Filter Failure

How do intelligence analysts handle the long-discussed problem of information overload? (The same question goes for information workers and government data of any kind.)

Tellme what you want

The future of social computing is in the integration of various services and technologies – but the fun is already available now. Here’s a nifty demo of the integration of cloud computing’s services with increasingly powerful mobile computers (smartphones or netbooks). Developers can take advantage of far more computational power both locally on the device – faster, cheaper processors thanks to Moore’s Law – and computational power residing on networked data centers.  Think of a business or social activity, and thanks to platforms like the iPhone, Android, and the new Windows Phones, “There’s an app for that.” Or there soon will be.

This quick little demo feels like nothing fancy today – but ten, even five years ago it would have seemed like sci-fi. In fact it’s available now, and uses a new Windows Phone, in this case a Samsung Intrepid, making use of Tellme software from Microsoft integrated with Bing Search web services. The demo intregrates some longtime technologies in their state-of-the-art condition today using cloud-services delivery:

• Speech-to-text
• GPS-enabled location-based services
• Web search
• Voice-enabled dialing
• Social media (crowdsourced ratings integrated in search results)
• Hardware UI (a dedicated TellMe button on the Samsung Intrepid phone)

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