by Kathleen Hickey, Government Computer News 

The U.S. State Department’s Tag Challenge will offer a $5,000 prize to anyone who can use Twitter and other social media and online tools to track down five fictional jewel thieves at large in Washington, D.C., New York, London, Stockholm, and Bratislava, Slovakia.

Participants will be given mug shots and brief descriptions of each thief, and tasked to locate the suspects, photograph them, and upload the images, with the winner being the first one to upload all five photos within a 12-hour window.

The contest will start at 8 a.m. local time in each of the five cities, when the mug shots of each suspect will be posted, and run until 8 p.m. The suspects are volunteers who will be on the move during the day, traveling predetermined routes that could include riding public transportation, going to coffee shops or visiting parks, according to the contest’s website. Contestant must use only the mug shot and other information provided by the contest website to identify the suspects.

The contest’s purpose is to demonstrate social networks’ ability to uncover information via sharing and spreading data. “It has become increasingly obvious over the past few years that open source information, especially in an age of social networking, can be at least as valuable as classified information,” said former U.S. counterintelligence executive Marion Bowman.

The contest was inspired by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, in which contestants had to use the Internet to find the whereabouts of 10 weather balloons scattered across the continental U.S. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the $40,000 prize by finding the balloons in a matter of hours. The contest begins March 31.  Report

DCL: Could the contestants use CEP to aid their search and recognition?

BBC News

Deutsche Telekom says it has set a new data transfer speed record over a long distance and outside a laboratory.

Deutsche Telekom researchers recently achieved a usable bit rate of 400 Gbps over a single channel of its fiber-optic network, more than double the 186 Gbps record set by researchers in the United States and Canada last year.

The researchers sent data along the company’s network between Berlin and Hanover and back again, a total distance of 456 miles. The experiment delivered a maximum 512 Gbps down each channel, of which 400 Gbps was usable data, which is the equivalent of transmitting 77 music CDs simultaneously in one second.

Each optical fiber can carry up to 48 channels, which means the total potential throughput could reach up to 24.6 Tbps. Deutsche Telekom says the achievement was realized by working with Alcatel Lucent to create new technologies installed in its terminal stations at either end of the fiber.

Much of the speed upgrade was accomplished via enhancements to the software used for forward error correction, which allowed a limited volume of corrupted bits to be corrected without having to resend the information. “It means improvements can be carried out without digging up the existing fiber, without massive hardware replacement–that’s actually the charm of the thing,” says Deutsche Telekom’s Heinrich Arnold.  News report

DCL: High speed event processing at the lower levels of events is alive and well. So lets get on with business level events.

by Joab Jackson, IDG News Service  

University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed a smart traffic intersection that can manage the flow of autonomous vehicles. The intersections of the future will not rely on stoplights or stop signs. Instead, when cars are driven by software, they could be managed by virtual traffic controllers, which stay in close contact with the automobiles as they approach the intersection, said Peter Stone, a professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin.

At least from a certain perspective, it is unusual that humans still drive their own vehicles, Stone explained. Other forms of mechanized transportation, such as airplanes, boats and railroad locomotives, have autopilot capabilities.

Using computers and sensor systems, autonomous vehicles could handle much of the routine navigation that humans now do. Autonomous cars could get their occupants to their destinations more quickly and be safer, advocates say. Such self-driving technology is still nascent, though organizations such as the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA) and Google are aggressively funding research in the area. And at least one state, Nevada, has already approved the use of autonomous vehicles on its roads.

Professor Peter Stone says intersections of the future will manage vehicles with virtual traffic controllers, which stay in close contact with the automobiles as they approach the intersection.

The researchers created a demonstration system for managing autonomous vehicle traffic in road intersections. Each intersection has a computer that coordinates all of the traffic in the most efficient way possible, and each car has a software agent that communicates with upcoming intersections. In the prototype system, a self-driving car takes instructions from the intersection manager as it approaches the intersection, waiting for other cars to go through the intersection before it passes through.

The system can be modified to work with both autonomous and human-driven cars. The researchers say it also could ensure that approaching emergency response vehicles can get through as quickly as possible, or participate in citywide traffic-shaping efforts, which could help reduce congestion overall. “We can prove that as long as all the cars follow the protocol we defined, then there will not be accidents,” Stone says.  Report.

DCL: There’s a lot of sophisticated event processing going on in such systems. Would be interesting to know more about this aspect of the work.

by NICOLE PERLROTH and NICK BILTON,   New York Times

The address book in smartphones — where some of the user’s most personal data is carried — is free for app developers to take at will, often without the phone owner’s knowledge.

Companies that make many of the most popular smartphone apps for Apple and Android devices — Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram among them — routinely gather the information in personal address books on the phone and in some cases store it on their own computers. The practice came under scrutiny Wednesday by members of Congress who saw news reports that taking such data was an “industry best practice.”

The U.S. Congress recently sent Apple a letter asking how approved apps were allowed to take that information without users’ permission, especially when Apple’s rules on apps expressly prohibit that practice. “We’re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release,” say Apple’s Tom Neumayr.

Although Google forces Android developers to ask users for permission to access any personal data up front, they often are not told how the information will be used or how the company plans to store it. “It’s time for app developers to take responsibility for ensuring that users know what they’re doing, rather than leaving it to the platforms to play a game of Whac-A-Mole,” says Future of Privacy Forum director Jules Polonetsky.

Many developers are changing their apps before Congress steps in, making updates and warning users about how the information is collected.  …………………………..

Google has tools built into the Android platform that forces developers to notify people what data, if any, they plan to access. Once they have users’ permission, Android developers can access everything from a phone owner’s call logs to their text messages. But users of many apps — including Hipster, Locale, Uber, Yelp, Taxi Magic, Picplz, Scrabble and Waze — are often not told how the information will be used or how the company plans to store it.

“What separates malicious use from legitimate use is the element of surprise. If a user is surprised, that’s a problem,” said Kevin Mahaffey, Lookout’s chief technology officer, who said that in many ways, standards and rules for data on smartphones were still being debated. “It’s a new industry and it’s still in many ways the Wild West out there. The iron is still hot.”  User beware

by Timo Elliott,   SmartDataCollective.com

The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation.

Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities to their business processes. This blog post attempts to explain what’s going on in the analytics market and give concrete examples of how other companies have implemented the new technologies in “game-changing” ways. ….

The economic environment is fraught with extreme uncertainty. This year, the people who run the world will change, and so will many of the policies of the countries they manage. Financial markets have still not completely stabilized, notably with the future of the Euro still not assured.

Companies have reacted to this uncertainty by slashing costs and accumulating cash, and now need to start investing that cash into future development. Since interest rates are low and the business outlook is still uncertain, many of them are using the money for new technology that can help them prepare for the future.

In particular, companies want better visibility about what’s going on in their market, and increased organizational agility in order to be able to deal with change fast. ……

Companies are investing heavily in analytics:

• Analytics is the #1 top technology priority for both CIOs and CFOs, according to Gartner
• Nucleus Research recently released a report showing that organizations get $10.66 of value for every $1 invested in analytics
• IDC has increased growth forecasts faced with stronger-than-expected figures for recent years
• IDC analyst Dan Vesset: “After three decades, the business analytics market is finally reaching the mainstream” and “There are few growth inhibitors in the foreseeable future”
• At the recent BI Gartner Summit in London, Gartner’s Dan Sommer announced an early estimate of 10%+ growth in analytics during 2011, outpacing general IT growth.

Analytics technology has been changing fast. On the back end, new technologies have come together to provide what Gartner calls “extreme data performance”. These include in-memory, column data stores, in-database calculations, massively parallel architectures, complex event processing, Big Data / NoSQL / Hadoop, and cloud architectures. …….

Lets take a look at three different types of High Resolution Management opportunity, letting companies:

• Remove bottlenecks
• Rethink business
• Flip business models

………………

Read the article

by App Man  SysCon Media

I have yet to meet anyone in Dev or Ops who likes alerts. I’ve also yet to meet anyone who was fast enough to acknowledge an alert, so they could prevent an application from slowing down or crashing. In the real world alerts just don’t work, nobody has the time or patience anymore, alerts are truly evil and no-one trusts them. The most efficient alert today is an angry end user phone call, because Dev and Ops physically hear and feel the pain of someone suffering.

Why? There is little or no intelligence in how a monitoring solution determines what is normal or abnormal for application performance. Today, monitoring solutions are only as good as the users that configure them, which is bad news because humans make mistakes, configuration takes time, and time is something many of us have little of.

It’s therefore no surprise to learn that behavioral learning and analytics are becoming key requirements for modern application performance monitoring (APM) solutions. In fact, Will Capelli from Gartner recently published a report on IT Operational Analytics and pattern based strategies in the data center. The report covered the role of Complex Event Processing (CEP), behavior learning engines (BLEs) and analytics as a means for monitoring solutions to deliver better intelligence and quality information to Dev and Ops. Rather than just collect, store and report data, monitoring solutions must now learn and make sense of the data they collect, thus enabling them to become smarter and deliver better intelligence back to their users……  Read on

by  Liz Ahlberg,  University of Illinois News Bureau

University of Illinois researchers recently examined the benefit of matching passenger risk with security assets and found that intensive screening of all passengers makes the system less secure by overtaxing security resources.

“A natural tendency, when limited information is available about from where the next threat will come, is to overestimate the overall risk in the system, [which] actually makes the system less secure by over-allocating security resources to those in the system that are low on the risk scale relative to others in the system,” says Illinois professor Sheldon H. Jacobson.

He says with security resources devoted to too many low-risk passengers, those resources are less able to identify high-risk passengers. “The cost of such a system is prohibitive, and it makes the air system more vulnerable to successful attacks by sub-optimally allocating security assets,” Jacobson says.

The researchers developed three algorithms dealing with risk uncertainty in the passenger population. They then ran simulations to demonstrate how the algorithms, applied to a risk-based screening method, could estimate risk in the overall passenger population. The researchers found that risk-based screening increases the overall expected security.

“The ideal situation is to create a system that screens passengers commensurate with their risk,” Jacobson says.  Read the Article. (the full technical paper is also available there)

by: Philip Howard, Research Director – Data Management, Bloor

There have been a couple of things floating around in the ether about CEP (complex event processing) recently. The first is the question, supposedly credited to Curt Monash, of whether it should be called something different.

I’ve been going back through my records. When I first wrote a product evaluation of what is now Progress Apama in 2002, I stated that “the company’s contention is that conventional approaches to real-time queries are only suitable for small scale environments or those in which limited numbers of data feeds are being monitored. In particular, its view is that these solutions cannot cope with environments where large numbers of data feeds need to be combined in a complex and dynamic fashion.” That was the only use of the word “complex” in a total of nearly 3,000 words. Events were mentioned several times, streams not at all.

As an aside, look at Wikipedia and other sources about the development of CEP and you’ll see lots of mentions of David Luckham, who coined the CEP term in his book “The Power of Events”, published in 2001. You will also see various other attributions to American scholarship but no mention at all to Cambridge (that’s UK not Harvard), which is where Apama came from. I guess all the writers are American. …..

…… What I didn’t mention was that there are a number of companies/products that have been specifically designed to work in conjunction with Hadoop, namely HStreaming, S4 (from Yahoo!) and Storm (from Twitter). I haven’t looked at any of these in detail so can’t comment on them but that is definitely an area that is heating up.  Read the Blog

DCL: John Bates’ PH.D. work on event processing at Cambridge in the 1990′s should definitely be credited in any account of the development of CEP.

by John Markoff, New York Times

The legal and ethical implications of autonomous vehicles recently were discussed by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars, and government officials at Santa Clara University.

Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun wrestling with the changes that would be required in a system created a century ago to meet the challenge of horseless carriages.

Google has demonstrated that autonomous vehicles could replace human drivers and greatly reduce human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that occur in the U.S. each year.

Google’s autonomous vehicles currently have driven 200,000 miles without an accident. Nevada was the first state to legalize driverless vehicles, and similar laws have been introduced in Florida and Hawaii.

However, several issues, such as whether police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, are unresolved, according to the University of Minnesota’s Frank Douma. “It’s a 21st-century Fourth Amendment seizure issue,” Douma says. The U.S. government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s O. Kevin Vincent.

Even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues, such as legal liability and insurance, would remain, says Stanford University’s Sven A. Beiker. In addition, autonomous vehicles rely on global positioning systems and satellite data, which are vulnerable to jamming by computer hackers. Article

DCL:  CEP will be an enabling technology inside these systems but the builders may not recognize that fact.

by Colin Neagle,   Network World

Microsoft announced plans to launch a real-time threat intelligence feed at the recent International Conference on Cyber Security. The project’s goal is to stream the company’s security information on dangerous and high-profile threats to organizations running the gamut from business partners and private corporations to domestic and foreign governments.

If the beta test is successful, Microsoft may make the feed publicly available. Microsoft’s T.J. Campana says the feed will serve as a Hadoop-based cluster merged with Windows Server, streaming information from a database that now contains data on the Kelihos botnet Microsoft first reported on in September.

“I don’t see a decrease in threats, but I do see this [feed] limiting the possible damage from a given threat as the community will be able to respond faster,” says Lumension analyst Paul Henry.

Microsoft will need to allay the concerns of privacy skeptics, particularly since the feed will circulate Internet Protocol addresses of systems that are discovered to be elements in large botnets. However, Henry says that security threat information can be exchanged without causing privacy infringement, noting that the Microsoft feed will bear a similarity to practices at the SANS Internet Storm Center.  Report