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!

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.

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.

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 !

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 !

This is all well and this is all great but what could it mean to the non-programmer ?

I recently resolved to take better advantage of my company’s social network. We use Lotus Connections and like all self adopting technology, my usage has grown but mostly in the areas that were tactical to my day-to-day work. What I started to notice was that I was seeing information from colleagues – both current and past – posting status (micro-blogging) which I’d remember days later when I was working on something new. Had I not seen those updates, I’d have missed valuable details which were making my work go faster. I wanted more !

Lotus Connections has a rich web experience for all of it’s capabilities. The problem for me is I like desktop software. I like things to seamlessly integrate into what I already do. The use of standards like ATOM and REST and the exposure of all aspects of Lotus Connections through APIs means different people can have different user experiences to the same set of services. I already knew about the tight integration to Lotus Notes and Sametime as well as seamless extensions to my Symphony, Windows PC, and Office products. Recenlty I also found a number of options for integrating Lotus Connections Status Updates – an internally developed plug-in for Sametime and Lotus Notes, a "hackday" project call Bluto, and Connections Glue, a great 3rd party app that gives the look and feel of TweetDeck.

Here’s my picks for favorite integration …

• Lotus Connections Files into Windows Explorer using the Plug-in for Microsoft Windows
• Lotus Connections Activities into Lotus Notes using the integrated features shipped with Notes 8.5.1
• Lotus Connections Status Updates into my system tray using Connections Glue
• Lotus Connections Communities into my feed reader (using the feed that gives me ">/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" href="http://>/news/atom/stories/public?source=communities&container=>" target=_blank>everything new")

What tools do you use every day and where can social software extend your reach and productivity ?

This morning I signaled a status update [think twitter] "Generating a list of 2000 fake name, titles, phone numbers, and office locations for our new demo sandboxes."  … one of my colleagues Graham, read what I wrote and replied with "Once you’ve got that list, could you send me a copy?"

… Alan’s entire post is here.

I’ve been in this exact situation myself – building a demo and feeling the need to generate a bunch of sample data. I would be grateful to discover someone else was already ahead of me and just as grateful to see my work get reused. Odds are good there are lots of work items that are small enough that you "just do it" your self but are probably already out there or being done by others.

Deploying a microblogging capability inside your firewall – whether it be Lotus Connections, Socialtext, Jive, or a stand-alone open source option – provides the value of sharing work information while not exposing it to the internet at large. If you prefer the outsourced experience of status updates but still want the privacy of your information, then a cloud service may be your preferred channel.

But microblogging is not the only mechanism for sharing information and reducing duplicate work. A "Shared Files" capability has a similar value. Consider the example above. The producer of the sample dataset may be separated from the consumer by days or weeks. If the dataset is published to an internal file sharing service, it can be found by others, tagged, rated, and more. If the status updates and shared files are linked to the author’s profile, then adhoc expertise evolves and it becomes increasingly easy to find the people you need to work on any given activity.

What social networking software capabilities are you considering ?

From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.

When I was in college, companies often donated hardware and some software to universities. This was a mixed blessing. The donation was great but it also meant that the college had to use their limited IT staff to manage the systems and the new equipment was always vying for limited raised floor lab space.

Here is where a cloud service could be a huge win for both the corporate sponsor and the university.

IBM announced it will make portions of its software portfolio available in a cloud computing environment to more easily allow professors to incorporate technology into their curricula and students to focus on development vs management of the systems they require. The initiative is called the Academic Skills Cloud and provides the software and system capabilities at no charge and without the need for students or faculty having to install and maintain it themselves.

Here are some additional resources:

• full article -> Academic Cloud to Speed Delivery of Technology Skills to College Students
• more about  IBM Cloud University Initiatives 
• recording of the live webcast