Communicat.us

I first heard about IBM’s challenge to build a computer system which could compete at the game of Jeopardy. Knowing the types of questions, the many ways the clues are hidden in the questions, and the enormous breadth of categories, I was definitely curious to see the path of the work. It’s here. It’s called Watson. And it’s VERY COOL.

The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”)

source: New York Times article

How Watson works is a great read. Watson is not infallible. As noted in the NYT article, one day it won four of six games and another day it won only three of seven games and in one case, had no winnings at all.

When Watson is playing a game, Ferrucci lets the audience peek into the computer’s analysis. A monitor shows Watson’s top five answers to a question, with a bar graph beside each indicating its confidence. Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level.

source: New York Times article

I have no desire to play Jeopardy against Watson … because I’m not very good at Jeopardy. But I am looking forward to watching the game!

I’ve been watching periodic helicopter maneuvers over the past year and occasionally try to take a picture or two. This week, I was luck the winds were favorable to shift the return flight path just enough to get a few ‘passable’ images.

The Wikipedia page on Navy Aircraft Squadrons still lists the HS-3 Tridents which have a slightly different insignia. However, given how close it was to what you vaguely see in the images, I was sure I was on the right track. A little more time with Goolge and I found the news story that HS-3 had moved from Jacksonville to Norfolk last year and became HSC-9. Mystery solved. (Of course, had I looked at the lettering under "NAVY" on the tail, I’d have spend a lot less time on this. DOH!)

The helicopter is the MH-60, and more specific, the MH-60S. (Anyone who knows otherwise, feel free to add a comment and I’ll make any necessary changes here.) There is a great image on the U.S. Navy’s Flickr gallery.

I don’t know that much about the Tridents but I do know they are active and a big part of this area. I also know that most of us probably don’t appreciate how much work goes on outside of the news cycle – as realized when I was reading a series of Facebook posts announcing multiple deployments to Haiti. I’ll key watching as they keep flying !

"Thank you for your  service" HSC-9 !

IBM Project Vulcan is a concept for the future of collaboration, including the future of Lotus Notes. IBM Project Vulcan is not a brand-new effort. It builds on the existing capabilities, and represents the future versions of, the IBM Lotus product portfolio — including Notes. One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios — making collaboration more focused and relevant. The vision of Project Vulcan intends to deliver collaboration across company boundaries; make it easy to deploy the technology; and include developer-friendly services and APIs.

Strategic Mission, Goal, UML, UPIA, MST …
DoDAF2 includes several key concepts that the focus of the strategic conceptualization, definition, design, implementation/acquisition and deployment of capabilities that are necessary to accomplishing strategic missions.

Performer – A Performer is an entity that can exhibit some behavior. A Performer is meaningless, unless it can actually perform something – i.e., it has the capability to perform some behavior.

Capability – A Capability is the ability to perform some action that contributes to accomplishing a goal. Capabilities support Strategic Missions that contribute to accomplishing goals.

So a Capability is the collection of performers that bring with them certain competencies that allow them to perform some behavior in the context of a Strategic Mission. A Capability is a collection of performers interacting. An interaction results in the exchange of information. Without Interaction, there is no Capability.

A Capability at the strategic level – i.e., “the Strategic Viewpoint”, is the statement of potential behavior that is needed to accomplish a mission.

A Capability involves:

• Participants/performers
• Interaction among the participants
• Information exchanged as a result of that interaction
• Interaction results in progress towards accomplishing some goal
• Interaction effects some change in the state of the participants

DoDAF 2 identifies the definition/requirements perspective as the “Operational Viewpoint“. As a Capability moves into this Operational Viewpoint, we need to add  ”operational” characteristics to the Strategic Viewpoint’s potential description. For DoDAF2, we use a CapabilityRole (formerly known in DoDAF1 as an Operational Node) as a place holder – a shell that encapsulates the capability and everything in the context of the capability that is not specifically one of the identified participants – e.g., a to-be system that will exhibit some of the behavior; that is, it identifies that which must be acquired in order for the Capability to be realized. That is, it integral to the interaction that realizes the Capability.

The System Viewpoint is the perspective of a Capability that reconciles the potential to the actual.  A System is a Capability that specifies completely the behavior that was encapsulated in a CapabilityRole and allocates that behavior to some physical/IT element.

An Organizational Resource is some existing physical/IT entity (i.e., participant/Performer) that can provide some behavior in the interaction that defines the Capability.

Following these definitions, we complete the cycle that starts with a strategic Capability, define its behavior in the operational viewpoint, design its implementation in the systems viewpoint, and after acquisition, it becomes an Organizational Resource that can then be included in future architectures.

Joe Russo over on Synchronous just posted a writ-up about how email is supported in Lotus Connections for communicating with members of a community …

Today in Connections Communities, there’s this button “Mail Community” that let’s someone send a direct email to people in the community and it has a few aspects to it, that you may or may not be aware of … and why they are there. … There is a different UI experience in connections for things like notifications … where we’ve adopted a UI that presents a list of people, by display name, with checkboxes alongside

So now the question is, should we drop the community mail design in favor of the more standard connections notification pattern? Also, as part of this question, I’d love to hear from you all about what, if any features from the community email form you make use of…like mailto link or expanding the To field, etc.

Read the entire post and add your requests in the comments section !

April 8, Washington, DC
The Intersection of Privacy and Analytics – What Every Government Agency Should Know
Agencies throughout the government are turning to analytics to improve their performance, gain greater insights into their business, and fulfill their agency missions.  But how do you employ analytics while maintaining compliance with the government’s privacy policies?  How do you use a Privacy Framework to guide your analytics programs?  Are there technology solutions coming to help you share or commingle data sources?

This session Includes a panel discussion with leading industry and IBM thought leaders:

• Dan Chenok, Senior Vice President, Pragmatics Inc., Chair, Information Security & Privacy Advisory Board (NIST)
• Ari Schwartz, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Center for Democracy and Technology, Member Information Security & Privacy Advisory Board (NIST)
• Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Chief Scientist, Entity Analytics
• Barbra Symonds, IBM Associate Partner, Security, Privacy, Wireless & IT Governance
• David Alley, IBM Optim World Wide Solution Leader
  • Panel Moderator: Harriet Pearson, IBM Vice President, Security Counsel & Chief Privacy Officer

April 15, Washington, DC
Emerging Technology for Smarter Government: Using Next Generation Collaboration and Data Analytics
You’ve heard about cloud computing, and you may have heard about Hadoop; now it’s time to see it in action and learn how they can be used to build a Smarter Government.  In this session you’ll hear from Stewart Nickolas, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Dan Gisolfi from IBM’s Emerging Technologies group. Stew and Dan will demonstrate some of their group’s projects, and Proofs of Concept (POCs) they have been building out with the U.K. Government to leverage these new technologies. Dan will talk about leveraging telepresence technology to improve collaboration, increase productivity and drive decision agility.  Stew will then show how data analytics can easily be done on very large volumes of data using these emerging technologies.

April 22, Washington, DC
Threat Prediction and Prevention: Connecting the Dots in an Increasingly Complex Threat Environment
The challenge of maintaining national security has never been greater.  The issue is,,, how to "connect the dots?"  Meet Fred Walker from NSA and Dale Killinger from the FBI to learn about the challenges involved with connecting and analyzing huge volumes of data in real-time.  Then hear from IBM experts, Tim Paydos and Tony Curcio, on proven practices for "connecting the dots" to support national security.

Register for any of these events and check out the IBM Analytics Solution Center website !