About the Other Intelligence Leadership Opening

Yes, the news is abuzz with leadership turnover in the Intelligence Community. Wait – not that news about outgoing DNI Dan Coats, the important news: it’s time for applications to the prestigious AFCEA International Intelligence Committee, the premier outside body of experts and insiders, government officials and business/academic leaders, who oversee the intelligence-related activities of the 32,000+ member organization.

Private-sector applicants for four-year terms can apply at this link. (Hurry! You have only a week till the deadline, midnight August 5, 2019.)  You can do the application in under an hour, not burdensome – no college transcripts 🙂

Where else in DC can you engage with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, hackathons on national security, and the leaders of the national-security community? My own tenure on the Committee has been fantastically fun and enlightening – and I hope helpful to AFCEA and the government agencies we advise and support. When I joined, our Committee’s Chair was the IC legend Maureen “Mo” Baginski, career NSA and FBI senior leader; and I’ve been honored to serve as vice-chair to her two successors in that seat, former DIA Director VADM Jake Jacoby, and current chair former head of Army Intelligence LTG Bob Noonan. Leaders from the world’s biggest defense/intelligence contractors are members, as well as successful startup leaders in the nat-sec space. We benefit from active emeritus members who continue to participate like CIA’s legendary Charlie Allen and the world’s preeminent scholar of intelligence Mark “Jeopardy Champion” Lowenthal.

You must have an active TS/SCI clearance, as many of our activities and conferences are classified. And the application weighs heavily on your career track record. We especially encourage applicants diverse in origin, gender, race, background, skills, and outlook —to reflect the nation as a whole and the diversity of the intelligence mission itself, and to break chains of old thinking and get crackling new ideas on tomorrow’s most significant topics.  

In considering applicants during the selection process, these are the primary precepts we keep in mind when we consider applicants:
(1) Would the candidate further Committee efforts to build bridges between industry and the government/military? And have the contacts to do so?
(2) Would the candidate enhance AFCEA’s reputation with the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense?
(3) Would the candidate likely be someone willing to actively engage with the Committee and help advance its goals?
(4) Would the candidate further thought leadership and innovation within AFCEA, to include involvement with other AFCEA Committee efforts?

A key element in the Committee’s success is close ties with the Intelligence Community’s and the military services’ intelligence and cybersecurity organizations, the ability to reach into those organizations with current contacts and the relationships permitting direct interface with leadership.  These are key to high-content industry days, quiet advisory engagement at the government’s request, speakers for meetings and the regular engagements that keep AFCEA Intelligence in the fore in their planning.  We have Committee members who have been in the forefront of these efforts who are rotating off the Committee or have rotated off in recent years, and we encourage recently retired senior civilian leaders and military members as well to apply.

When I was elected not long after leaving government service and going back to the tech industry, I wrote here about the Committee’s history and prominence, and that I was “honored to be elected” to this “prestigious collection of some of the smartest minds in that field.” I was tempted to respond then with William F. Buckley’s great line from his quixotic and unsuccessful Mayoral campaign in New York City in 1965, when he was asked what his first act would be if elected: “Demand a recount!”

Once again, here’s that link to the application site. Good luck!

 

 

 

 

Building the Next Great Virtual Machine

I have a great new job, allowing me to spend several weeks recently in the center of the universe, and I’m loving it. I’m going to spend even more time there from now on.

By that I mean Palo Alto, Silicon Valley’s capital and VMware HQ, where I am now Senior Director, National Technology Strategy, working primarily with the R&D team. But I can’t help putting that “Valley capital” term in a bit of historical context. Back in ancient times (late ’80s-early ’90s) when I worked for the Mayor of San Jose, S. J. City Hall was dealing with a bit of civic insecurity. Although San Jose’s population was already larger than San Francisco and now the tenth largest city in the country, our mayor (my boss Tom McEnery, the first government leader ever elected to the Silicon Valley Business Hall of Fame) believed that we needed to brand the city explicitly as “The Capital of Silicon Valley.” So that became a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign, and we punched the message home every chance we got.

Yet as the mayor’s policy adviser and speechwriter, I laughed each time I used the phrase. I had just moved to San Jose from Palo Alto, where I got a graduate degree at Stanford. Just twenty miles up Highway 101, Palo Alto had much better claim to being the center of the geographically hazy electronics domain. I knew the arguments we used in San Jose (see here for example). But I also had already met Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in person in Palo Alto, and had walked many times on the sidewalk by the legendary garage at 367 Addison where HP was born in the late 1930s; and I had also seen a different historic marker four blocks from the garage, at the corner of Channing and Emerson, commemorating Palo Alto’s very first electronics startup – Federal Telegraph Company, founded in 1909.

Palo Alto itself has spawned thousands of startups for many many decades, and it never stopped. Fast forward to the turn of the millenium just 20 years ago, when Microsoft and Amazon were trying to shift attention to Seattle/Redmond, Palo Alto struck back and fostered yet another legendary Valley startup: VMware – now my new home. Here’s the origin context for VMware, from an official history of Stanford Research Park:

It can be said that one of the cornerstones of Silicon Valley was laid when Varian Associates broke ground as Stanford Research Park’s first company in 1951. The Stanford Industrial Park, as it was first called, was the brainchild of Stanford University’s Provost and Dean of Engineering, Frederick Terman, who saw the potential of a University-affiliated business park that focused on research and development and generated income for the University and community.

Dean Terman envisioned a new kind of collaboration, where Stanford University could join forces with industry and the City of Palo Alto to advance shared interests. He saw the Park’s potential to serve as a beacon for new, high-quality scientists and faculty, provide jobs for University graduates, and stimulate regional economic development.

In the 1950s, leaders within the City of Palo Alto and Stanford University forged a seminal partnership by creating Stanford Research Park, agreeing to annex SRP lands into the City of Palo Alto to generate significant tax revenues for the County, City, and Palo Alto Unified School District.

Throughout our history, an incredible number of breakthroughs have occurred in Stanford Research Park. Here, Varian developed the microwave tube, forming the basis for satellite technology and particle accelerators. Its spin-off, Varian Medical, developed radiation oncology treatments, medical devices and software for medical diagnostics. Steve Jobs founded NeXT Computer, breaking ground for the next generation of graphics and audio capabilities in personal computing. Hewlett-Packard developed electronic measuring instruments, leading to medical electronic equipment, instrumentation for chemical analysis, the mainframe computer, laser printers and hand-held calculators. At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), innovations such as personal work stations, Ethernet cabling and the personal computer mouse were invented. Lockheed’s space and missile division developed critical components for the International Space Station. Mark Zuckerberg grew Facebook’s social networking platform from 20 million to 750 million people worldwide while its headquarters were in the Park.

Today, Tesla’s electric vehicle and battery prototypes are developed and assembled here in its headquarters. Our largest tenant, VMware, continues to create the virtualization hardware and software solutions they pioneered, leading the world in cloud computing. With over 150 companies in 10 million square feet and 140 buildings, Stanford Research Park maintains a world-class reputation.

source: Stanford Research Park, “About Us”

In the summer of 2017, I got an email from a former Microsoft research colleague and one of the most eminent leaders in American technology R&D, David Tennenhouse. David has held key leadership roles in dream positions over the past quarter-century – everyone has wanted him on their team. He was Chief Scientist at DARPA; a research professor at MIT; President of Amazon’s R&D arm A9; VP & Director of Research at Intel; a senior leader in Microsoft’s Advanced Strategy and Research division. Smart companies have wooed him in serial fashion. Now David is VMware Chief Research Officer building and leading a stellar team, and over several months into 2018 we had some great conversations about where VMware had been and was going, and what I could bring to that journey. I had a chance to speak with several of the dozens of Ph.D.s he has been hiring to flesh out a comprehensive R&D agenda. I excitedly joined recently and we’ve been off to the races.

For a 20-year-old startup, the company’s growing like gangbusters (the stock market obviously still loves it), and it ranks high every year on lists of Best Employers. But what really attracted me was the stress on R&D and innovation culture, driving an unbelievably ambitious vision. I had always been impressed by VMware’s early virtualization technology; at DIA we were pioneering federal customers fifteen years ago, and wound up using it as a foundation of what would become our private cloud infrastructure. But VMware scientists and research engineers took virtualization much further, with abstraction becoming almost addictively popular. After the server and the OS were virtualized, so was storage, and then networks, and then the data center itself. Now our research agenda is energetically broad, across the following areas:

In fact, any large complex orchestration of resources, hardware, and processes may actually be just the next big virtual machine. We intend to build it, with disruptively great software. In 2011, web pioneer and Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen wrote a famous manifesto in the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software is Eating the World”:

“More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.”

That’s why I smiled last month, just after joining VMware, when our CEO Pat Gelsinger rebuffed talk of him moving to Intel as that company’s new CTO. He began his career at Intel, was its first-ever CTO and the father of the fabled -486 processor. But today he’s virtualizing the world’s computational resources, and Pat tweeted his response to a CNBC anchor’s comments about the Intel CEO job: “I love being CEO of VMware and not going anywhere else. The future is software!”

I still intend to live in Virginia and work closely with DC government friends and colleagues on research, reflecting the Valley’s traditionally close working  partnership with the federal government. In fact, if you’re in a government position and are wondering “What’s going on inside VMware Research labs?” – drop me a line 🙂

Coming to DC, One-Day Delivery from Jeff Bezos

If you read this blog you care about government and technology. And whether you’re a technologist or not, you can see the tech forces shaping and sharpening the uses of digital capabilities in accomplishing the ends of government, whether that’s citizen-service delivery and local law enforcement, or global diplomacy and nation-state combat. I’ve worked on and written about them all – from intelligence to space to AI, or the quantification of Supreme Court humor, even “Punk Rock and Moore’s Law.”

Understanding and forecasting that radical pace of external change is difficult for government professionals, and they need help doing that. Let’s say you wanted to tap someone to offer insight. Who’d be on your dream list? At the top of my dream list – my absolute “if-only-I-could-ask” list – would be Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

So I’m going to sit down with Jeff Bezos on stage later this month, at the annual AFCEA Intelligence Symposium, for a conversation about areas where technology critically intersects with the nation’s response to enduring challenges and opportunities, such as artificial intelligence, digital innovation, the revolution in cloud computing, and commercial space operations. (I serve as national Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee at AFCEA, the 35,000-member Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association.)

The 2017 Symposium features, as usual, a stellar line-up of top leaders in national security, with panels on Advanced Conventional Threats, the Contested Environment of Space, Terrorism, Cyber Threats from Nation-States and Non-State Entities, and Gray-Zone Conflicts/Hybrid Warfare (topic of last year’s Defense Science Board study on which I sat). All sessions feature senior thought-leaders from government and industry.

Jeff Bezos might be new in that particular mix, but you can understand why we invited him. He has been TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year (early in his career in 1999), Fortune Magazine’s Businessperson of the Year, topped the Forbes annual list of “World’s Greatest Leaders,” and our rationale for this conversation is his long track record of revolutionary contributions to international technological/economic advance, as well as to US national security. AWS is now of central importance to the public sector (including intelligence), and the broader contributions of Amazon and Blue Origin to the nation’s economic future and success are incalculable.

 

If you have a Top Secret/SI/TK clearance, you can attend the Symposium – register. [Update: sorry, 2017 Symposium = sold out]

There’s a longstanding meme that government should be “run like a business.” I typically don’t think in precisely those terms, having been on both sides and recognizing the significant differences in intent and stakeholders.

Panel on Defense Innovation and DIUx

I’ve been more interested in helping each sector understand the unique contributions of the other, and the complexities inherent in their relationship. (See for example my recent post on DoD Innovation and DIUx in Silicon Valley.)

But the “run government like a business” impetus is understandable here in the United States as a reflection of dissatisfaction with government performance in meeting its own goals, and the expectations of the citizens it serves. President Trump recently assigned Jared Kushner to lead a new White House Office of American Innovation, and Kushner told the Washington Post “We should have excellence in government. The government should be run like a great American company.” The Washington Post (coincidentally owned by, yes, Jeff Bezos) ran a piece exploring the history of that thinking, dating its surge in popularity to the early 1980s under President Reagan – a timeline borne out by running the phrase through Google’s Ngram Viewer (see chart).

The last time I invited a smart young billionaire to come speak to Intelligence Community leaders, it worked out pretty well for the audience (see “Burning Man and AI: What Elon Musk told me and the role of Art“). So I’m aiming even higher this year…

If you don’t have a Top Secret clearance, you can’t get into the Symposium, and won’t be able to hear Bezos firsthand on April 27. But here’s a substitute, nearly as good: this week Bezos published his annual Letter to Shareholders of Amazon. Most people in the business world know about his legendary 1997 “first annual letter to shareholders” in which he laid out an extraordinary long-term vision for his company. The 2017 version is also extraordinary, and I urge you to read it in full. My friend Jeff Jonas, former IBM Chief Scientist for Context Computing and now founder/Chief Scientist at Senzing, calls it “the most impressive annual letter to shareholders I’ve ever read; this line of thinking leads to greatness.”

– – – – –

For some parting eye-candy, here’s video from last week’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, where attendees got a first-hand look at the historic Blue Origin New Shepard rocket booster (first to land vertically after spaceflight, first to relaunch again, and now a five-time-reuse trophy), and an inside tour of the crew capsule with “the largest windows in space travel.”

 

 

Docere et Facere, To Teach and To Do

“Helping aspiring data scientists forge their own career paths, more universities are offering programs in data science or analytics.” – Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017

George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman provides the maxim, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Most of us know this as “Those who can’t do, teach.” (And Woody Allen added a punch line in Annie Hall: “… and those who can’t teach, teach gym.”)

I’m determined both to do and to teach, because I enjoy each of them. When it comes to data and advanced analytics, something I’ve been using or abusing my entire career, I’m excited about expanding what I’m doing. So below I’m highlighting two cool opportunities I’m engaging in now…

 

Teaching Big Data Architectures and Analytics in the IC

I’ve just been asked by the government to teach again a popular graduate course I’ve been doing for several years, “Analytics: Big Data to Information.” It’s a unique course, taught on-site for professionals in the U.S. intelligence community, and accredited by George Mason University within GMU’s Volgenau Graduate School of Engineering. My course is the intro Big Data course for IC professionals earning a master’s or Ph.D. from GMU’s Department of Information Sciences and Technology, as part of the specialized Directorate for Intelligence Community Programs.

I enjoy teaching enormously, not having done it since grad school at Stanford a million years ago (ok, the ’80s). The students in the program are hard-working data scientists, technologists, analysts, and program managers from a variety of disciplines within the IC, and they bring their A-game to the classroom. I can’t share the full syllabus, but here’s a summary:

This course is taught as a graduate-level discussion/lecture seminar, with a Term Paper and end-of-term Presentation as assignments. Course provides an overview of Big Data and its use in commercial, scientific, governmental and other applications. Topics include technical and non-technical disciplines required to collect, process and use enormous amounts of data available from numerous sources. Lectures cover system acquisition, law and policy, and ethical issues. It includes discussions of technologies involved in collecting, mining, analyzing and using results, with emphasis on US Government environments.

I worry that mentioning this fall’s class now might gin up too much interest (last year I was told the waiting list had 30+ students who wanted to get in but couldn’t, and I don’t want to expand beyond a reasonable number), but when I agreed this week to offer the course again I immediately began thinking about the changes in the syllabus I may make. And I solicit your input in the comments below (or by email).

For the 2016 fall semester, I had to make many changes to keep up with technological advance, particularly in AI. I revamped and expanded the “Machine Learning Revolution” section, and beefed up the segments on algorithmic analytics and artificial intelligence, just to keep pace with advances in the commercial and academic research worlds. Several of the insights I used came from my onstage AI discussion with Elon Musk in 2015, and his subsequent support for the OpenAI initiative.

More importantly I provided my students (can’t really call them “kids” as they’re mid-career intelligence officials!) with tools and techniques for them to keep abreast of advances outside the walls of government – or those within the walls of non-U.S. government agencies overseas. So I’m going to have to do some work again this year, to keep the course au courant, and your insight is welcome.

But as noted at the beginning, I don’t want to just teach gym – I want to be athletic. So my second pursuit is news on the work front.

 

Joining an elite Mission Analytics practice

I’m announcing what I like to think of as the successful merger of two leading consultancies: my own solo gig and Deloitte Consulting. And I’m even happy Deloitte won the coin-toss to keep its name in our merger 🙂

For the past couple of years I have been a solo consultant and I’ve enjoyed working with some tremendous clients, including government leaders, established tech firms, and great young companies like SpaceX and LGS Innovations (which traces its lineage to the legendary Bell Labs).

But working solo has its limitations, chiefly in implementation of great ideas. Diagnosing a problem and giving advice to an organization’s leadership is one thing – pulling together a team of experts to execute a solution is entirely different. I missed the camaraderie of colleagues, and the “mass-behind-the-arrowhead” effect to force positive change.

When I left Microsoft, the first phone call I got was from an old intelligence colleague, Scott Large – the former Director of NRO who had recently joined Deloitte, the world’s leading consulting and professional services firm. Scott invited me over to talk. It took a couple of years for that conversation to culminate, but I decided recently to accept Deloitte’s irresistible offer to join its Mission Analytics practice, working with a new and really elite team of experts who understand advanced technologies, are developing new ones, and are committed to making a difference for government and the citizens it serves.

Our group is already working on some impressively disruptive solutions using massive-scale data, AI, and immersive VR/AR… it’s wild. And since I know pretty much all the companies working in these spaces, I decided to go with the broadest, deepest, and smartest team, with the opportunity for highest impact.

Who could turn down the chance to teach, and to do?

 

Video of DoD Innovation Discussion at Cybersecurity Summit

Earlier this week I wrote (“Beware the Double Cyber Gap“) about an upcoming Cybersecurity Summit, arranged by AFCEA-DC, for which I would be a panelist on innovation and emerging technologies for defense.

The Summit was a big success, and in particular I was impressed with the level and quality of interaction between the government participants and their private-sector counterparts, both on stage and off. Most of the sessions were filmed, and are now available at http://www.cybersecuritytv.net.

You can watch our panel’s video, “Partnering with Industry for Innovation,” and it will provide an up-to-the-moment view of how US Cyber Command and the Department of Defense as a whole are attacking the innovation challenge, featuring leadership from the USCYBERCOM Capabilities Development Group, and the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental. Solarflare CEO Russ Stern (a serial entrepreneur from California) and I offered some historical, technical, market, and regulatory context for the challenge those two groups face in finding the best technologies for national security. Most of my remarks are after the 16:00 minute mark; click the photo below to view the video:

From my remarks:

“I’m here to provide context. I’ve been in both these worlds – I came from Silicon Valley; I came to the Defense Intelligence Agency after 9/11, and found all of these broken processes, all of these discontinuities between American innovation & ingenuity on one hand, and the Defense Department & the IC & government at large…

Silicon was a development of government R&D money through Bell Labs, the original semiconductor; so we have to realize the context that there’s been a massive disruption in the divorcing of American industry and the technology industry, from the government and the pull of defense and defense needs. That divorcing has been extremely dramatic just in the past couple of years post-Snowden, emblematically exemplified with Apple telling the FBI, “No thanks, we don’t think we’ll help you on that national security case.”

So these kinds of efforts like DIUx are absolutely essential, but you see the dynamic here, the dynamic now is the dog chasing the tail – the Defense Department chasing what has become a massive globally disruptive and globally responsive technology industry…  This morning we had the keynote from Gen. Touhill, the new federal Chief Information Security Officer, and Greg told us that what’s driving information security, the entire industry and the government’s response to it is the Internet – through all its expressions, now Internet of Things and everything else – so let’s think about the massive disruption in the Internet just over the last five years.

Five years ago, the top ten Internet companies measured by eyeballs, by numbers of users, the Top 10 were all American companies, and it’s all the ones you can name: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo… Guess what, three years ago the first crack into that Top 10, only six of those companies were American companies, and four – Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, and Sohu – were Chinese companies. And guess what, today only five are American companies, and those five – Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo – eighty percent or more of their users are non-U.S. Not one of those American internet companies has even twenty percent of their user-base being U.S. persons, U.S. citizens. Their market, four out of five of their users are global.

So when [DoD] goes to one of these CEOs and says, “Hey c’mon, you’re an American” – well, maybe, maybe not. That’s a tough case to sell. Thank God we have these people, with the guts and drive and the intellect to be able to try and make this case, that technological innovation can and must serve our national interest, but that’s an increasingly difficult case to make when [internet] companies are now globally mindsetted, globally incentivized, globally prioritizing constantly…”

Kudos to my fellow panelists for their insights, and their ongoing efforts, and to AFCEA for continuing its role in facilitating important government/industry partnerships.

Twitter Search as a Government case study

In addition to periodic think-pieces here at Shepherd’s Pi, I also contribute a monthly online column over at SIGNAL Magazine on topics relating to intelligence. This month I keyed off a recent discussion I had onstage at the 2015 AFCEA Spring Intelligence Symposium with Elon Musk, particularly a colloquy we had on implications of the emerging cleavage (post-Edward Snowden) between Silicon Valley technology companies and their erstwhile innovation partners, U.S. intelligence agencies.

Meet the Future-Makers

Question: Why did Elon Musk just change his Twitter profile photo? I notice he’s now seeming to evoke James Bond or Dr. Evil:

I’m not certain, but I think I know the answer why. Read on…

Insider’s Guide to the New Holographic Computing

In my seven happy years at Microsoft before leaving a couple of months ago, I was never happier than when I was involved in a cool “secret project.”

Last year my team and I contributed for many months on a revolutionary secret project – Holographic Computing – which is being revealed today at Microsoft headquarters.  I’ve been blogging for years about a variety of research efforts which additively culminated in today’s announcements: HoloLens, HoloStudio for 3D holographic building, and a series of apps (e.g. HoloSkype, HoloMinecraft) for this new platform on Windows 10.

For my readers in government, or who care about the government they pay for, PAY CLOSE ATTENTION.

It’s real. I’ve worn it, used it, designed 3D models with it, explored the real surface of Mars, played and laughed and marveled with it. This isn’t Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.” Everything in this video works today:

These new inventions represent a major new step-change in the technology industry. That’s not hyperbole. The approach offers the best benefit of any technology: empowering people simply through complexity, and by extension a way to deliver new & unexpected capabilities to meet government requirements.

Holographic computing, in all the forms it will take, is comparable to the Personal Computing revolution of the 1980s (which democratized computing), the Web revolution of the ’90s (which universalized computing), and the Mobility revolution of the past eight years, which is still uprooting the world from its foundation.

One important point I care deeply about: Government missed each of those three revolutions. By and large, government agencies at all levels were late or slow (or glacial) to recognize and adopt those revolutionary capabilities. That miss was understandable in the developing world and yet indefensible in the United States, particularly at the federal level.

I worked at the Pentagon in the summer of 1985, having left my own state-of-the-art PC at home at Stanford University, but my assigned “analytical tool” was a typewriter. In the early 2000s, I worked at an intelligence agency trying to fight a war against global terror networks when most analysts weren’t allowed to use the World Wide Web at work. Even today, government agencies are lagging well behind in deploying modern smartphones and tablets for their yearning-to-be-mobile workforce.

This laggard behavior must change. Government can’t afford (for the sake of the citizens it serves) to fall behind again, and  understanding how to adapt with the holographic revolution is a great place to start, for local, national, and transnational agencies.

Now some background…

Intelligence Technology, Waiting for Superman

…or Superwoman.

Amid the continuing controversies sparked by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing defection revelations, and their burgeoning effects on American technology companies and the tech industry worldwide, the afflicted U.S. intelligence community has quietly released a job advertisement for a premier position: the DNI’s National Intelligence Officer for Technology.

You can view  the job posting at the USAJOBS site (I first noticed it on ODNI’s anodyne Twitter feed @ODNI_NIC), and naturally I encourage any interested and qualified individuals to apply. Keep reading after this “editorial-comment-via-photo”:

How you’ll often feel if you take this job…

Whether you find the NSA revelations to be infuriating or unsurprising (or even heartening), most will acknowledge that it is in the nation’s interest to have a smart, au courant technologist advising the IC’s leadership on trends and directions in the world of evolving technical capabilities.

In the interest of wider exposure I excerpt below some of the notable elements in the job-posting and description…. and I add a particular observation at the bottom.

Job Title: National Intelligence Officer for Technology – 28259

Agency: Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Job Announcement Number: 28259

Salary Range: $118,932.00  to  $170,000.00

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

Oversees and integrates all aspects of the IC’s collection and analytic efforts, as well as the mid- and long-term strategic analysis on technology.

Serves as the single focal point within the ODNI for all activities related to technology and serves as the DNI’s personal representative on this issue.

Maintains senior-level contacts within the intelligence, policymaking, and defense communities to ensure that the full range of informational needs related to emerging technologies are met on a daily basis, while setting strategic guidance to enhance the quality of IC collection and analysis over the long term.

Direct and oversee national intelligence related to technology areas of responsibility; set collection, analysis, and intelligence operations priorities on behalf of the ODNI, in consonance with the National Intelligence Priorities Framework and direction from the National Security Staff.

In concert with the National Intelligence Managers/NIOs for Science and Technology and Economic Issues, determine the state of collection, analysis, or intelligence operations resource gaps; develop and publish an UIS which identifies and formulates strategies to mitigate gaps; advise the Integration Management Council and Integration Management Board of the gaps, mitigation strategies, progress against the strategies, and assessment of the effectiveness of both the strategies and the closing of the intelligence gaps.

Direct and oversee Community-wide mid- and long-term strategic analysis on technology. Serve as subject matter expert and support the DNI’s role as the principal intelligence adviser to the President.

Oversee IC-wide production and coordination of NIEs and other community papers (National Intelligence Council (NIC) Assessments, NIC Memorandums, and Sense of the Community Memorandums) concerning technology.

Liaise and collaborate with senior policymakers in order to articulate substantive intelligence priorities to guide national-level intelligence collection and analysis. Regularly author personal assessments of critical emerging technologies for the President, DNI, and other senior policymakers.

Develop and sustain a professional network with outside experts and IC analysts, analytic managers, and collection managers to ensure timely and appropriate intelligence support to policy customers.

Brief senior IC members, policymakers, military decisionmakers, and other major stakeholders.

Review and preside over the research and production plans on technology by the Community’s analytic components; identify redundancies and gaps, direct strategies to address gaps, and advise the DNI on gaps and shortfalls in analytic capabilities across the IC.

Determine the state of collection on technology, identify gaps, and support integrated Community-wide strategies to mitigate any gaps.

Administer National Intelligence Officer-Technology resource allocations, budget processes and activities, to include the establishment of controls to ensure equities remain within budget.

Lead, manage, and direct a professional level staff, evaluate performance, collaborate on goal setting, and provide feedback and guidance regarding personal and professional development opportunities.

Establish and manage liaison relationships with academia, the business community, and other non-government subject matter experts to ensure the IC has a comprehensive understanding of technology and its intersection with global military, security, economic, financial, and/or energy issues.

…

Technical Qualifications:

Recognized expertise in major technology trends and knowledge of analytic and collection issues sufficient to lead the IC.

Superior capability to direct interagency, interdisciplinary IC teams against a range of functional and/or regional analytical issues.

Superior interpersonal, organizational, and management skills to conceptualize and effectively lead complex analytic projects with limited supervision.

Superior ability to work with and fairly represent the IC when analytic views differ among agencies.

Superior communication skills, including ability to exert influence with senior leadership and communicate effectively with people at all staff levels, both internal and external to the organization, to give oral presentations and to otherwise represent the NIC in interagency meetings.

Expert leadership and managerial capabilities, including the ability to effectively direct taskings, assess and manage performance, and support personal and professional development of all levels of personnel.

Superior critical thinking skills and the ability to prepare finished intelligence assessments and other written products with an emphasis on clear organization, concise, and logical presentation.

Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs):

Leading People: This core qualification involves the ability to lead people toward meeting the organization’s vision, mission, and goals. Inherent to this ECQ is the ability to provide an inclusive workplace that fosters the development of others, facilitates cooperation and teamwork, and supports constructive resolution of conflicts. Competencies: Conflict Management, Leveraging Diversity, Developing Others, and Team Building

Leading Change: This core qualification involves the ability to bring about strategic change, both within and outside the organization, to meet organizational goals. Inherent to this ECQ is the ability to establish an organizational vision and to implement it in a continuously changing environment. Competencies: Creativity and Innovation, External Awareness, Flexibility, Resilience, Strategic Thinking, and Vision.

…

HOW YOU WILL BE EVALUATED:

You will be evaluated based upon the responses you provide to each required Technical Qualifications (TQ’s) and Executive Core Qualifications (ECQ’s). When describing your Technical Qualifications (TQ’s) and Executive Core Qualifications (ECQ’s), please be sure to give examples and explain how often you used these skills, the complexity of the knowledge you possessed, the level of the people you interacted with, the sensitivity of the issues you handled, etc. Your responses should describe the experience; education; and accomplishments which have provided you with the skills and knowledge required for this position. Current IC senior officers are not required to submit ECQs, but must address the TQs.

Only one note on the entire description, and it’s about that last line: “Current IC senior officers are not required to submit Executive Core Qualifications, but must address the Technical Qualifications.”  This is perhaps the most important element in the entire description; it is assumed that “current IC senior officers” know how to lead bureaucratically, how to manage a staff – but in my experience it cannot be assumed that they are necessarily current on actual trends and advances in the larger world of technology. In fact, some might say the presumption would be against that currency. Yet they must be, for a variety of reasons never more salient than in today’s chaotically-evolving world.

Good luck to applicants.

[note: my title is of course a nod to the impressive education-reform documentary “Waiting for Superman“]

 

Bullshit Detector Prototype Goes Live

I like writing about cool applications of technology that are so pregnant with the promise of the future, that they have to be seen to be believed, and here’s another one that’s almost ready for prime time.

The Washington Post today launched an exciting new technology prototype invoking powerful new technologies for journalism and democratic accountability in politics and government. As you can see from the screenshot (left), it runs an automated fact-checking algorithm against the streaming video of politicians or other talking heads and displays in real time a “True” or “False” label as they’re speaking.

Called “Truth Teller,” the system uses technologies from Microsoft Research and Windows Azure cloud-computing services (I have included some of the technical details below).

But first, a digression on motivation. Back in the late 1970s I was living in Europe and was very taken with punk rock. Among my favorite bands were the UK’s anarcho-punk collective Crass, and in 1980 I bought their compilation LP “Bullshit Detector,” whose title certainly appealed to me because of my equally avid interest in politics 🙂

Today, my driving interests are in the use of novel or increasingly powerful technologies for the public good, by government agencies or in the effort to improve the performance of government functions. Because of my Jeffersonian tendencies (I did after all take a degree in Government at Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia), I am even more interested in improving government accountability and popular control over the political process itself, and I’ve written or spoken often about the “Government 2.0” movement.

In an interview with GovFresh several years ago, I was asked: “What’s the killer app that will make Gov 2.0 the norm instead of the exception?”

My answer then looked to systems that might “maintain the representative aspect (the elected official, exercising his or her judgment) while incorporating real-time, structured, unfiltered but managed visualizations of popular opinion and advice… I’m also a big proponent of semantic computing – called Web 3.0 by some – and that should lead the worlds of crowdsourcing, prediction markets, and open government data movements to unfold in dramatic, previously unexpected ways. We’re working on cool stuff like that.”

The Truth Teller prototype is an attempt to construct a rudimentary automated Political Bullshit Detector, and addresses each of those factors I mentioned in GovFresh – recognizing the importance of political leadership and its public communication, incorporating iterative aspects of public opinion and crowd wisdom, all while imbuing automated systems with semantic sense-making technology to operate at the speed of today’s real world.

Real-time politics? Real-time truth detection.  Or at least that’s the goal; this is just a budding prototype, built in three months.

Cory Haik, who is the Post’s Executive Producer for Digital News, says it “aims to fact-check speeches in as close to real time as possible” in speeches, TV ads, or interviews. Here’s how it works:

The Truth Teller prototype was built and runs with a combination of several technologies — some new, some very familiar. We’ve combined video and audio extraction with a speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false.

We are transcribing videos using Microsoft Audio Video indexing service (MAVIS) technology. MAVIS is a Windows Azure application which uses State of the Art of Deep Neural Net (DNN) based speech recognition technology to convert audio signals into words. Using this service, we are extracting audio from videos and saving the information in our Lucene search index as a transcript. We are then looking for the facts in the transcription. Finding distinct phrases to match is difficult. That’s why we are focusing on patterns instead.

We are using approximate string matching or a fuzzy string searching algorithm. We are implementing a modified version Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance algorithm as our first implementation. This will be modified to recognize paraphrasing, negative connotations in the future.

What you see in the prototype is actual live fact checking — each time the video is played the fact checking starts anew.

 – Washington Post, “Debuting Truth Teller“

The prototype was built with funding from a Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund grant, and you can read more about the motivation and future plans over on the Knight Blog, and you can read TechCrunch discussing some of the political ramifications of the prototype based on the fact-checking movement in recent campaigns.

Even better, you can actually give Truth Teller a try here, in its infancy.

What other uses could be made of semantic “truth detection” or fact-checking, in other aspects of the relationship between the government and the governed?

Could the justice system use something like Truth Teller, or will human judges and  juries always have a preeminent role in determining the veracity of testimony? Will police officers and detectives be able to use cloud-based mobile services like Truth Teller in real time during criminal investigations as they’re evaluating witness accounts? Should the Intelligence Community be running intercepts of foreign terrorist suspects’ communications through a massive look-up system like Truth Teller?

Perhaps, and time will tell how valuable – or error-prone – these systems can be. But in the next couple of years we will be developing (and be able to assess the adoption of) increasingly powerful semantic systems against big-data collections, using faster and faster cloud-based computing architectures.

In the meantime, watch for further refinements and innovation from The Washington Post’s prototyping efforts; after all, we just had a big national U.S.  election but congressional elections in 2014 and the presidential race in 2016 are just around the corner. Like my fellow citizens, I will be grateful for any help in keeping candidates accountable to something resembling “the truth.”