Government agencies and departments are learning to live with travel restrictions and discovering innovative alternatives amid an anti-conference trend brought on by budget restrictions and well-publicized abuses.
But some managers fear the trend will inhibit federal workers’ ability to stay current with new technology field advancements or to consult with experts in the private sector via site visits, professional seminars and annual conferences. Keep reading →
“If people do not emit or discuss their behavior, it’s hard to find out what they are going to do,” declared Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, speaking recently at the huge annual conference of intelligence professionals called Geoint.
The U.S., he made clear, did not have tactical warning of the Benghazi attacks. He also noted that anti-American protests were taking place in 54 countries when the attacks occurred, clearly implying the intelligence community was hearing a lot of noise that day.
While it’s true, it’s hard to predict what people will do, it’s also increasingly true that people worldwide do emit and discuss their behavior through online social media and that can be monitored and analyzed in nearly real-time.
Companies such as intelligence analysis contractor Recorded Future, which is backed by Google, the CIA, and others for this very reason, offer examples of that on a routine basis. Recorded Future, for instance, tracks protests occurring around the world by extracting references to those events and their locations from online media.
One of their measurements records “intensity” of references to protests in online media and social media, with color coded indicators signifying heavy discussion of protests, little or no discussion at all. One can also see the list of terms associated with protests in a selected country during the selected week and protests planned for the future.
There are certainly caveats to be kept in mind with these data sets and visualizations. The protest metric is not perfect, and not all protests are comparable. Much has been made of the role of social media in facilitating protest movements in the Middle East and China, but it could also be amplifying their impact.
Dr. Melissa Flagg, a senior Department of Defense manager at the RFUN event noted how analysts are starting to use Recorded Future to guide future DoD science and technology investments by tweeting: “We have to tell the story of the long term to the people who only care about the next three minutes.”
Recorded Future CEO Chris Ahlberg and inventor of Spotfire, says that Recorded Future is the only comprehensive source of past, planned and predicted events on the web and the world’s first Temporal Analytics Engine. His goal is to eventually provide access to everything on the Web in nearly real-time. This of course would be an example of really big data analysis, using the cloud like the National Security Agency has talked about.
Recorded Future is also stressing the importance of data science and data scientists in all of this. Their event featured Drew Conway (@drewconway) speaking about the joys, challenges, and power of data science. Among other insights, Conway showed some results that suggest the peaks in country protests are related to food shortages.
As a data scientists having also worked with Recorded Future on things like Visualization Of The Osama Bin Laden Letters, I could not resist checking and building on their analysis of trends in global protests (see table below.)
It shows, for instance among the top 10 countries for protest intensity, registered in the Recorded Future data set for October 1, 2011, to October 11, 2012, the United States is the most frequently mentioned term – showing up in five of the top 10 instances.
The chart also includes comments worth noting.
Keep reading →
A new narrative is emerging in government innovation and it goes something like this: Truly great leaps in innovation are almost never possible with monolithic, proprietary approaches to software development, and many small innovations, when taken together, often lead to large, game-changing paradigms.
That was the message delivered by both government and private sector IT professionals at the Red Hat Government Symposium on Oct. 23. The event, sponsored by Red Hat Inc. focused on the importance of transparency, open sharing, and collaboration to the success of the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative, as well as how open source software can help agencies accomplish their missions in a time of dwindling resources. Keep reading →
It is one of the most challenging times in American history to be part of a government bureaucracy. A dysfunctional congress offers little or no support; agency budgets face gutting as the nation stares down a fiscal cliff; hiring freezes and the looming shadow of furloughs threaten to turn the government’s talent pool stagnant.
But if you’re an innovator, this is – in a strange and unfortunate way – good news. Keep reading →
This is the last of a four-part series on innovation at the National Weather Service.
The National Weather Service has improved disaster response through a collaborative project aimed at communicating crucial weather information and helping emergency managers stay current and build networks online and onsite. Keep reading →
This is the third in a series of stories about innovation at the National Weather Service.
A new version of the well-known weather Doppler radar technology now gives meteorologists the ability to see storms from additional angles and provide a more accurate forecast. Keep reading →
This is the second in a series of stories about innovation at the National Weather Service.
This storm season, National Hurricane Center scientists are using sophisticated simulation models, new-age aircraft and better communications tools to achieve finely honed forecasting. Keep reading →
A scientist working with the federal government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today.
David J. Wineland and Serge Haroche, a professor at Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure, in Paris, were jointly recognized for their respective work in observing and analyzing the fundamental interactions between light particles and matter. Keep reading →
This is the first in a series of stories about innovation at the National Weather Service.
The National Weather Service is on a hunt for killer tornadoes, using the latest technology to warn people sooner and creating a model that could be used by other agencies to make predictions on everything from health to the economy. Keep reading →
Most government agencies strive to use technology more effectively, but only a few use it to directly save lives.
Despite its small size, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization comes up with techniques and technologies to get rid of bombs and shares that information with U.S. and allied warfighters through an online training portal. Keep reading →