Big data related to our safety

In this video, the speaker is Ira “Gus” Hunt, Chief Technology Officer in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He talks about CIA’s three “business lines”, they collect information that reveals the plans, intentions and capabilities of their adversaries and provides the basis for decision and action; producing timely analysis that provides insight, warning and opportunity to the President and decision makers charged with protecting and advancing America’s interests; conducting covert action at the direction of the President to preempt threats or achieve US policy objectives. From four years ago, CIA has a plan about what should do in the future, which they call the Four Big Bets, the four big bets are Revolutionize Big Data Exploitation, Accelerate Operational Excellence, Serve CIA by supporting the IC, Drive Performance through Talent Management. Social, Mobile and Cloud construct Big Data, and which is considered as three driving forces, and then he talks about three emerging forces. After that he talks about the impact of Big Data, Four rules of Big Data, their problem, and characteristics of Big Data. With the impact of Big Data, he says “ Know what we know, discover the gaps in our knowledge, focus targeting to fill the gaps, more effective use of expensive or long lead collection assets, better global coverage to limit surprise, and enhance understanding and improve analysis.” The four rules of Big Data are simple but meaningful: It’s the data, power to the people, latency breeds contempt, and context, context, context. In addition, CIA’s job are leverage the Big Data world, find the information that matters, connect the dots, and understand the plans of our adversaries. Moreover, the characteristics of Big Data are firstly, more is always better, secondly, signal to noise only gets worse, thirdly, enumeration not modeling, last one, requirements are usually hindsight. In the end of the presentation, the officer talks about today and tomorrow situations. Today, analytics and tools are hard to use, specialists are required to derive value, skilled people are in short supply algorithms are dense and arcane, require a lot of hand curation and built for business not for intelligence. Tomorrow, elegant, powerful and easy to use tools and visualizations, machines to do more of the heavy lifting, intelligent systems that learn from the user, correlation not search, and “curiosity layer”- machines that are curious on your behalf. Cloud era has passed, now is Big Data era.

Now let’s see a video from Bob Flores, founder of applicology incorporated and former CTO of the CIA. What is the most interesting part of this video is how big data application can elevate the mission to a new level. The most useful part of Big Data analysis in the Public Sector is how to use the previous data to predict what’s going to happen tomorrow. He said the prediction is much important even though that is not a typical science.

Let’s see the website of CIA. Here is the link https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2012-featured-story-archive/big-data-at-the-cia.html. It said the big data is a big deal at the CIA. They have lots of things to be concerned every day. Such as cell phones, satellite sensors, etc. will create huge amounts of information. They need to find out what actually maters and figure out the problems. It has mentioned on the website that CIA is hiring the big data specialists and they need to inform US policymakers, help drive successful intelligence operations and define resource needs and investment. Actually, there will be lots of things and application that the big data could do for CIA. The big data is not only a technology, it also be a great way to make our lives safe. Go big data.