SESSION 1: Mobile Social Networking for ISR

Dr. Goolsby received her doctorate from University of Washington in social anthropology, specializing in SE Asia and West Africa with concentrations in political economy, social change, religion, and international development issues. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Thailand and taught at several universities on the West Coast before coming to the Office of Naval Research(ONR) in 2000. She began her career at ONR by conducting research on social network analysis and Al Qaeda in response to the U.S.S. Cole bombing. This research became the foundation of a full program in combating terrorist network through social network analysis in 2002, the earliest computational social science program in the Department of Defense, for which she received recognition from the Navy in 2008. She has written several articles on terrorism and social networks, crisis mapping and humanitarian assistance as well as editing several issues of peer reviewed journals social science and computational social interest. She is best known for her 2009 article: "Lifting Elephants: Twitter and Blogging in Global Perspective." IN: Social Computing and Modeling Social Behavior. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k4484k1825pm8885/

Another popular article, "Social media as crisis platform: the future of community maps/crisis maps" appeared in the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1858955

Her current portfolio of programs is concerned with research on community mobilization and coordination using social media and computational social science

Mr. Jay Crossler
MITRE Corporation

May 22, 2012 at 10:30

ABSTRACT

BIO

Jay A. Crossler received his BS in Information Decision Systems from Carnegie Mellon University and his MS in Information Security from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is pursuing a Ph.D. of Information Technology at George Mason University, and has taught advanced XML and Web Service Masters classes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Jay joined the US Air Force as a communications officer, and wrote nine unclassified and classified portals and command & control web tools for the military. While stationed within the Defense Information Systems Agency at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, he served as the Chief Webmaster for the Joint Staff and for Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. As a Captain, Jay was awarded the 2002 Pentagon Officer of the Year.

After leaving the military, Jay joined the MITRE Corporation, a non-profit group that advises the government on systems integration and how best to use technology. He is a researcher and Senior Principal Software Systems Engineer. He also serves as the Associate Technical Integrator for a division of 450 technical experts and scientists.

Jay currently focuses his research on Mobile Applications, Serious Games, Software Frameworks, and Social Networking.

Defining and Managing Security Issues

Brendan Farrar-Foley

 and Dr. Kevin Flotz
Institute for Defense Analyses

May 22, 2012 at 10:30

ABSTRACT

Mobile Social Apps are popular for smart phones and other devices. They allow anyone to easily communicate data about themselves and their environment. Although they are typically designed for consumers, many are also useful for government work. These apps, the operating systems and hardware they run on, and the service providers that they connect to do not place a priority on user security, but even under these conditions these apps can be used productively. This talk consists of two parts. Part 1 talks about the security problems facing apps today. Part 2 talks about best practices for using these apps despite their security problems.

BIOs

KEVIN FOLTZ works in the Information Technology and Systems Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He supports the Air Force as Lead Systems Validator for Air Force Distributed Systems. Areas of interest include information assurance, web service technologies, and performance evaluation. Dr. Foltz has a PhD and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Math and Computer Science from Rice University, and a M.A. in Strategic Security Studies from National Defense University.

BRENDAN FOLEY works for the Information, Technology, and Systems Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses supporting top level decision makers within the Air Force, Navy, and DoD in cloud computing, enterprise IT, risk management and security. Mr. Foley has worked at several startup companies with their internet and development strategies. He has a M.S. in Computer Security and Information Assurance from the George Washington University where he founded the Cybersecurity Research Lab, which is still in use today in the hands-on education of students.

The New Challenge of Data Inflation

    Jonathan Gosier

May 22, 2012 at 10:30

ABSTRACT

The online chatter of individuals, networks of friends or professionals, and the data being created by networked devices is growing exponentially, although our time to consume it remains depressingly finite. There are a plethora of solutions that approach this problem in different ways. But what are the methodologies that have worked at scale and how are they being used in the field?

One can surmise that with more people in developing countries around the world move into the middle class and come online, this exponential growth is picking up pace. By 2015 we'll be creating that much content daily (if we aren't already). This is on the conservative side, and doesn't consider the growth of image data, video, networked devices and the contextual metadata created around it all.

The Information Age is behind us, we're now living in an Infinite Age, where the flow of data is ever-growing and ever-changing. The life of this content may be ephemeral (social media) or mostly constant (static documents and files). In either case, the challenge is dealing with it at human scale.

By the time you finish reading a given blog post, chances are high that it's been retweeted, cited, aggregated, pushed, commented on, or 'liked' all over the web. An all encompassing verb to describe this is sharing. All of these actions, the sharing, confuse our ability to define the essence of that original content, because value has been added at different points, by people who've consumed it later.

Does that additional activity become a part of the original content, or does it exist as something else entirely? Is the content the original blog post, or that post coupled with the likes, retweets, comments and so on?

Content is now born and almost instantaneously multiplies, not just through copying, but also through the interactions individuals have with it - ways of making it their own and subsequently augmenting it.

BIO

JONATHAN GOSIER is a designer, software developer, data scientist and the co-founder of metaLayer.com which aims to change how users analyze content by offering products for atomizing and visualizing data.

metaLayer takes sophisticated algorithms like sentiment analysis, influence detection, and optical character recognition and distills the use of such technologies into a drag and drop experience. This allows anyone to draw meaningful conclusions from complex, and excessive datasets.

From 2009 to 2011 he served as Director of Product for SwiftRiver at Ushahidi working on an open-source platform for drawing insight from real-time communication during crisis events to verify the accuracy of claims made on social media channels. The SwiftRiver project was awarded the 2011 Knight News Challenge award for its potential to improve the data journalism and news gathering process.

In 2009 Jon spoke at TED in Oxford, UK about his company Appfrica and one of their projects which connected rural African villages with the internet through a call center and light infrastructure. The service, in collaboration with non-profit OpenMind, was called QuestionBox and allowed people with no access to the internet to ask questions and get timely, vetted answers. This project was lauded by PC Magazine in 2009 as "Searching Where Google Can't".